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Lentil Vegetable Soup

A soup of lentils and chopped carrots, parsnip, turnip, and onion, seasoned with salt, pepper, butter, and optional sherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak lentils overnight.

  2. Chop the carrot, parsnip, turnip, and onion into small pieces.

Cook

  1. In a pot, combine lentils and chopped vegetables.

  2. Add enough water to cover the ingredients and cook for three hours.

Season and serve

  1. Season with salt, black pepper, and butter, or with salt, Nepal or paprika pepper, and sherry wine before serving.

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. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

  3. Lentils + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lentils + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Lentils
Break down during long cooking to thicken the soup and give it body.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body as it softens during the long simmer.
Parsnip
Adds sweetness and a starchy body as it softens in the broth.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and body as it softens during cooking.
Onion
Adds savory depth and aroma as it cooks down into the broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, carrot, parsnip, turnip, pepper, butter, sherry):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, carrot, parsnip, turnip, pepper, butter, sherry. 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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