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Lentil Plant

A hearty lentil stew with veal stock, herbs, and bread crumbs, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and lentils 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 ↓

Lentil Plant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan and add sliced onion and herbs. Cook until tender.

  2. Press the mixture through a coarse sieve and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Moisten with half the quantity of good soup and simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  4. If no soup is available, add sliced onion, carrot, and lettuce to the stewpan with butter and simmer for 5-6 minutes.

Stew and finish

  1. Add veal stock and lentils, then stew for 30 minutes.

  2. Add another pint of stock and boil for 1 hour.

  3. Stir in the crumbs of a roll, rub through a tammy cloth, and boil once more before serving.

  4. Serve with well-boiled Patna rice in a tureen.

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. Onion + lentilstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,221 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lentils + ricetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together256 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Break down during long stewing to thicken the liquid and give the stew body.
Veal stock
Provides the main liquid and savoury depth for the stew.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion and herbs and carries their flavour into the base.
Crumbs of a roll
Absorb liquid and help thicken the stew once stirred in.
Well-boiled patna rice
Served alongside to add starch and bulk to the meal.

The step that matters

Adding the crumbs and reboiling. Once the roll crumbs are stirred in, the stew must be rubbed smooth and brought back to a boil; undercooked starch leaves a pasty texture and raw flour taste.

Swap the lentils

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Peanutfits better
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, veal, rice. 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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