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Whole Lentil Soup

A hearty soup made with whole lentils, onions, carrots, turnips, stock, and seasoned with pepper and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 109 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Whole Lentil Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the lentils overnight.

  2. In the morning, stew the lentils in stock (or water) with the sliced vegetables.

Fry and strain

  1. After 3 hours, remove the lentils and vegetables from the soup.

  2. Fry the lentils and vegetables in deep fat until lightly browned.

  3. Return them to the stock and simmer gently for another hour.

  4. Rub the mixture through a colander.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the cornflour with a little cooled soup, then add it to the rest.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes, stirring often.

  3. Season with pepper and salt, and serve.

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. Lentils + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lentils + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Whole lentils
Provide the main body and bulk, breaking down into a thick, substantial soup.
Cornflour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells and sets when boiled.
Onion
Adds savoury flavour, and browning in fat deepens it further.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and body to the soup.

The step that matters

Mixing the cornflour with cooled soup, then boiling. Stirring cornflour into cooled liquid first keeps it from clumping. Boiling for the full time swells the starch granules so the soup thickens evenly and loses any raw starch taste.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, carrot, turnip, pepper, butter):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, carrot, turnip, pepper, butter. 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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