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Soup

Sifted Lentils

A simple lentil dish prepared by rinsing, soaking, cooking, sifting, and seasoning with salt and optional nut butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and butter work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 486 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sifted Lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rinse the lentils thoroughly and soak them in cold water for at least 2 hours, or longer if possible.

Cook and strain

  1. Cook the lentils slowly until they are perfectly tender.

  2. Pass the cooked lentils through a colander.

Season

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and nut butter 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 + buttertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together486 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Provide the main bulk and body, and softened starch that thickens the purée as they break down.
Nut butter
Adds fat and richness, giving a smoother mouthfeel and deeper flavour.

The step that matters

Cook the lentils slowly until perfectly tender. A gentle simmer lets lentils soften evenly and absorb water without bursting. Cooking them too hard can split the skins unevenly and leave some grains firm, which makes passing them through a colander harder and the texture less smooth.

“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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