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Curried Lentils

A lentil dish simmered with butter, onion, curry powder, lemon juice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Curried Lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the lentils in water for 3 to 4 hours, then drain them.

Make the curry

  1. Put the lentils in a saucepan with butter and sliced onion.

  2. Cook until the onion is nicely browned.

  3. Add the lentils and boiling water.

  4. Simmer for 1 hour.

  5. Stir in lemon juice, curry powder, salt, and pepper.

  6. Cook for an additional 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled rice.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lentils + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,221 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lentils + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together249 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Lentils + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Red lentils
Form the main body of the dish, softening and thickening as they cook.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the onion brown.
Onion
Browns in the fat to add sweetness and savoury depth.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma and flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the spices and lentils.

The step that matters

Cook the onion until nicely browned. Browning the onion in butter develops sweet, savoury flavours through the Maillard reaction. Pale onion leaves the finished dish flat and less rich.

Swap the lentils

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, lemon, pepper):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Black-eyed peafits better
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, lemon, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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