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Lentil Soup

A hearty soup made with lentils, ham, onion, celery, and seasonings, served with croutons and optional parsley or sorrel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and sorrel share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the lentils in water for 2 hours.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, combine soaked lentils, cold water, onion, celery tops, salt, peppercorns, and ham.

  2. Boil gently for 3 hours, adding more hot water if needed.

  3. Strain the soup through a sieve, discarding the ham, onion, and celery.

  4. Rub the lentils through the sieve back into the soup and whisk thoroughly.

Serve

  1. Taste for seasoning and serve with croutons and a garnish of parsley and sorrel 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 + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + sorreltop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + sorreltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry lentils
Break down during long simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Ham
Adds savoury, smoky depth to the broth as it simmers.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the base broth.
Celery tops
Contribute a fresh, herbal aroma to the simmering broth.

The step that matters

Rub the lentils through the sieve. Pushing the cooked lentils through the sieve breaks them down into fine particles that thicken the broth and give it a smooth, velvety texture. Skipping this or using a coarse sieve leaves the soup thin and gritty.

Swap the sorrel

The recipe marks sorrel as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, onion, celery, ham, parsley):

  1. Sorrelthe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Turmericfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, onion, celery, ham, parsley. 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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