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Fricassee of Lentils

A lentil dish simmered with butter, onion, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fricassee of Lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lentils

  1. Prepare and cook the lentils until tender, then drain them.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and sauté the chopped onion until soft.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook slowly until browned.

  3. Add some of the lentil broth to create a light sauce and bring to a boil for 15 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the drained lentils, season with salt and pepper, and let simmer for 15 minutes before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lentils + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Lentils
Form the bulk of the dish and provide texture and body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and carries the flavor of the onion.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aroma as it softens in the butter.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a sauce and helps brown the roux.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until browned. Cooking flour in fat long enough develops a nutty, browned flavor and removes raw starch taste. Cooking it too briefly leaves the sauce pasty; cooking it too long can scorch it and make it bitter.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Kalefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, butter, flour, pepper. 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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