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Sauce

Lentil Sauce

A sauce made from cooked lentils, milk, browned flour, and optional parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 322 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub the cooked lentils through a colander into a saucepan.

  2. Add the milk and a little sauce.

  3. Bring to a boil, then stir in the browned flour mixed with a little cold milk.

  4. Add chopped parsley if desired.

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. Lentils + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together322 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lentils + milktop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together140 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Cooked lentils
Form the body of the sauce and give it a thick, smooth texture once pureed.
Milk
Adds liquid and creaminess, loosening the lentil purée into a pourable sauce.
Browned flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats and adds a toasted, nutty flavor.

The step that matters

Stir in the browned flour mixed with cold milk. Flour clumps if added dry or to hot liquid. Mixing it into cold milk first lets the starch disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly when it reaches a boil.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, milk, flour):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, milk, 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.

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