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Curried Lentils

A lentil dish cooked with butter, onions, curry powder, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,221 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Curried Lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lentils

  1. Wash the lentils and soak them.

  2. Drain and cook in the stock or water for one hour until they form a dry mass.

Make the curry

  1. Melt the butter or drippings in a pan, add sliced onions and curry powder.

  2. Fry until the onions are brown.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the lentils, season, and heat through.

  2. Serve with boiled rice.

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 + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,221 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. 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
Form the bulk of the dish, softening as they cook and absorbing the cooking liquid.
Butter or drippings
Fat that carries the curry flavour and helps the onions brown.
Onions
Browning them adds sweetness and savoury depth to the dish.
Curry powder
Gives aroma and flavour when it is fried in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until brown. Browning the onions develops sweet, deep flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale onions leave the dish flat, while over-darkened onions turn bitter and can scorch the curry powder.

Swap the lentils

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

  1. Sesamefits better
  2. Peanutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion. 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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