Skip to main content
Main

Lentil and Tomato Soup

A simple soup made with lentils, tomatoes, celery, and butter, thickened with browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tomato and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,377 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Lentil and Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the soup

  1. Cook lentils, tomatoes, water, butter, and celery together until done.

  2. Add more water to achieve desired soup consistency.

  3. Heat the soup to boiling.

  4. Remove the celery.

  5. Season with salt.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix browned flour with a little water to form a paste.

  2. Add the paste to the soup.

  3. Boil the soup for a few minutes.

  4. 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. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  2. Lentils + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together255 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lentils + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together316 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lentils + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together463 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Provide the main body and bulk of the soup as they soften during cooking.
Stewed strained tomatoes
Add acidity and liquid, forming the savory tomato base of the soup.
Browned flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when boiled with liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, rounding out the flavor and mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Adding the browned flour paste. Flour must be smoothed into a paste with water before adding, otherwise it clumps and forms lumps. Boiling for a few minutes then cooks out the raw starch taste and fully thickens the soup.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, butter, celery, flour. 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 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipes