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Boiled Lentils

A simple boiled lentil dish with onion, butter, sugar, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick over and wash the lentils.

Cook the lentils

  1. In a saucepan, combine lentils, cold water, onion, and drippings.

  2. Bring to a gentle boil and cook for about three hours, adding ⅓ cup of cold water every fifteen minutes.

  3. After one hour, season with salt and pepper.

  4. Once lentils are soft, drain the water.

  5. Remove the onion if desired.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in butter, sugar, and parsley.

  2. Adjust seasoning to taste.

  3. 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Lentils + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together322 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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

Lentils
Form the main body of the dish and become tender and soft during long simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded fat flavor to the finished lentils.
Drippings
Add savory, meaty flavor to the cooking liquid.
Sugar
Adds a small amount of sweetness to balance the savory seasonings.

The step that matters

Cooking the lentils gently for about three hours. A gentle simmer lets lentils soften evenly without bursting. A hard boil can break the skins and turn them mushy, while adding cold water keeps the simmer steady and the lentils tender.

Swap the lentils

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, parsley, pepper, sugar):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Black-eyed peafits better
  3. Beansfits about as well
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, parsley, pepper, sugar. 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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