Skip to main content
Main

Lentil Salad

A salad of boiled lentils mixed with onions, celery, beetroot, herbs, olive oil, lemon juice, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Lentil Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Let the boiled lentils cool completely and drain them carefully.

  2. Mix the lentils with about a fourth of their weight in cooked onions or celery.

Make the salad

  1. For the Provençal style, heat the lentils in a pan with olive oil to keep them moist, shaking the pan occasionally.

  2. Add chopped parsley, shredded onion, thyme, and other herbs to the lentils.

  3. Just before serving, stir in lemon juice and the egg yolk, ensuring the mixture does not boil.

  4. Form a pile of the lentil mixture in the center of a dish and arrange the chopped beetroot around it.

  5. Pour salad dressing over the lentil salad and 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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lentils + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Olive + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,948 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (apple, fatty).

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 salad and give it a firm, tender texture.
Olive oil
Adds fat and moisture, keeping the warmed lentils from drying out.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the dressing.
Egg yolk
Acts as an emulsifier and thickener, helping bind the dressing smoothly.
Beetroot
Adds colour, earthy sweetness and moisture to the dish.

The step that matters

Adding the lemon juice and egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens when heated and can scramble or curdle if the mixture boils. Stirring it in just before serving, off the heat, keeps the dressing smooth and creamy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, beetroot, olive, parsley, thyme, lemon, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, beetroot, olive, parsley, thyme, lemon, egg. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes