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Whole Lentil Soup

A hearty soup made with lentils, mutton, mixed vegetables, onions, and thickened with cornflour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,221 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Whole Lentil Soup

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Rinse the lentils and soak them in water for a few hours.

  2. Chop the onions and sauté them until golden.

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, add the mutton and cover with water. Bring to a boil and simmer until tender.

  2. Add the soaked lentils and chopped vegetables to the pot.

  3. Add the sautéed onions to the pot.

  4. Mix the cornflour with a little water to make a paste, then stir it into the soup to thicken.

  5. Season with coarse sea salt to taste and simmer for an additional 30 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mutton + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,531 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Lentils + muttontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Provide body and protein-rich substance that thickens the soup as they break down.
Mutton
Adds meaty flavour and richness to the broth as it simmers until tender.
Cornflour
Thickens the soup when mixed into a paste and stirred in.
Onions
Sautéing until golden adds sweetness and savoury depth to the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring in the cornflour paste. Cornflour must be mixed smooth with cold water first, then stirred into simmering soup. Added dry or lumpy, it clumps and does not thicken evenly. Starch thickens only when hot enough to swell and gelatinise.

Swap the lentils

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Peasfits better
  3. Sesamefits about as well
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion. 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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