Skip to main content
Main

Lentil-flour Soup

A thick soup made with lentil flour, potatoes, vegetables, and stock, finished with Bovril.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil-flour Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the onion and turnip, and grate the carrot.

  2. Cook the vegetables in melted butter with the herbs and seasonings for a few minutes.

Make the soup

  1. Bring the stock to a boil, skim it, then add the cooked vegetables and boil until tender enough to strain through a sieve.

  2. Mix the lentil flour with cold water to form a paste, then add it along with the mashed potatoes.

  3. Boil for 20 minutes, stir in the Bovril, and serve with fried bread or toast.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentil flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it body and a earthy, nutty flavor.
Potatoes
Mashed into the soup, they add starch that thickens it and a smooth, creamy texture.
Bone stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor of the whole soup.
Bovril
Adds concentrated savory, meaty depth stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Mixing the lentil flour with cold water into a paste. Stirring flour directly into hot liquid causes lumps, because starch granules swell on the outside before the inside can hydrate. A smooth cold-water paste disperses evenly, so the soup thickens without clumps.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, flour, onion, carrot, turnip, butter, sugar):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, flour, onion, carrot, turnip, butter, 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipes