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Lentil Rissoles

Lentil rissoles are pastry-wrapped lentil patties seasoned with butter, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and stock, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Lentil Rissoles

Why it works: Lentils and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Rissoles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the lentils in water until tender, then mash and pass through a wire sieve.

  2. Mix in the butter, season with pepper, salt, and nutmeg, and moisten with stock.

Shape the rissoles

  1. Roll out the pastry as thin as possible and cut into rounds.

  2. Place a small amount of the lentil mixture on each round, fold over, wet the edges, and seal.

  3. Coat the rissoles in egg and then in bread crumbs or sprinkle with broken vermicelli.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the rissoles in deep fat until golden brown and 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Lentils + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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 filling, becoming soft and cohesive when boiled and mashed.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the filling a smoother, more tender texture.
Pastry
Encloses the filling and crisps into a golden shell when fried.
Egg
Forms a wash that helps the coating adhere and browns the outside.
Bread crumbs
Create a crisp, browned outer coating when fried.

The step that matters

Sealing the rissoles. If the edges are not wetted and sealed well, the filling can leak into the fat during frying, making the rissoles greasy and prone to bursting.

Swap the lentils

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, nutmeg, egg, bread):

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, nutmeg, egg, bread. 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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