Name: Lentils, to Boil
Ingredients: 1 cup lentils; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ½ ounce butter

Why it works: Lentils and butter work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 486 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lentils, to Boil

Ingredients

1 cup lentils
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt
½ ounce butter

Directions

Prepare

Wash the lentils well in cold water.
Cover the lentils with cold water and add salt.

Cook and serve

Boil for 1.5 hours.
Strain the water off.
Place in a hot dish and add butter.
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.

Lentils + buttertop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together486 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils: Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and soft as they cook.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the finished lentils.

“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.