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Lentil Puree I LA Soubise

A smooth lentil puree flavored with sautéed onions and optionally colored with spinach extract or burnt sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 132 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Puree I LA Soubise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lentils

  1. Rinse the lentils.

  2. Boil the lentils in water for about 4 hours until soft.

  3. Skim off any dark film that rises to the surface.

  4. Strain the lentils through a wire sieve, rubbing the contents through to create a smooth puree.

Make the onion purée

  1. In a pan, fry the sliced onions in butter until brown.

  2. Boil the browned onions in some of the soup broth until tender.

  3. Rub the onions through a wire sieve.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the sieved onions to the lentil soup.

  2. If desired, color the soup with spinach extract or burnt sugar.

  3. Stir the soup constantly while warming to prevent burning.

  4. Before serving, stir the soup in the tureen with a ladle.

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 + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + spinachtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Green or red lentils
Break down into a smooth puree that forms the body of the soup.
Onions
Browning and sweetness add depth, and sieving them gives a smooth, thickening base.
Butter
Fat for frying the onions, adding richness and helping them brown.

The step that matters

Stir the soup constantly while warming. Lentil purees are thick and rich in starch and sugar, so they settle and scorch on the base of the pan. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly and prevents burning.

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, onion, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, onion, 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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