Name: Lentil Toast
Ingredients: 1 pint lentils; ½ cup nut cream; salt to taste; flour (optional, for thickening); moistened slices of zwieback

Why it works: Lentils and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 255 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lentil Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Cook lentils until tender, then rub through a colander.
Combine lentils, nut cream, and salt in a bowl.
Adjust consistency: add more nut cream if too thick, or thicken with flour and cold water if too thin.
Spread lentil mixture on moistened zwieback slices.

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.

Lentils + flourtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together255 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together30,481 recipes

Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).
Lentils + creamtop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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 spread once cooked and pureed.
Nut cream: Adds richness and moisture, loosening the lentil mixture to a spreadable texture.
Flour: Thickens the mixture with starch when it is too thin, giving it body.

The step that matters

Adjust consistency. Lentil purée can range from stiff to runny depending on how well it cooked. Flour thickened with cold water sets the starch without lumps, while adding nut cream loosens it. Checking the texture before spreading prevents a mixture that slides off or cannot be spread evenly.