Skip to main content
Main

Fried Lentils

A simple dish of lentils sautéed with onion, drippings, parsley, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lentils and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 322 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fried Lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the lentils according to package instructions.

  2. Finely chop the onion.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the onion in the drippings until light yellow.

  2. Add the lentils to the onion and drippings, along with the chopped parsley.

  3. Season to taste.

  4. Shake the mixture until it browns slightly, then serve hot.

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 + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together322 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 + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Form the bulk of the dish and provide its main body and texture.
Drippings
Add fat for frying the onion and carry flavour into the lentils.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, adding aroma to the dish.

The step that matters

Shake the mixture until it browns slightly. Browning depends on surface heat and moisture loss. Stop too early and the lentils stay pale and soft; leave them too long and they can scorch and turn bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, parsley):

  1. Kalefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, parsley. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes