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Soup, Puree of Lentils, Conte

A thick lentil puree soup made with onions, carrots, parsley, and game broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Soup, Puree of Lentils, Conte

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lentils

  1. Wash the lentils and place them in a saucepan with water.

  2. Bring to a boil and skim the surface.

  3. Add the onions, cloves, parsley, and carrots. Season with salt.

  4. Cover and simmer until tender.

  5. Remove the parsley, carrots, and onions. Strain the soup through a fine sieve.

Finish the soup

  1. Return the soup to the saucepan and add game broth to achieve the desired consistency.

  2. Heat the soup, stirring until it boils. Simmer for 30 minutes, skimming as needed.

  3. Prepare the braised celery separately. Cut into scallops. Add to the soup 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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Break down into a thick puree that gives the soup its body.
Onions
Add aromatic sweetness and depth as they cook into the broth.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and savoury flavour to the soup base.
Game broth
Adjusts the soup to the desired consistency and adds meaty flavour.
Braised celery
Adds a tender, savoury vegetable element to finish the soup.

The step that matters

Skimming the surface. Foam and impurities rise as the lentils come to a boil. Skimming them off keeps the soup clear and free of bitter or greyish flavours.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, clove, parsley, carrot, celery):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, clove, parsley, carrot, celery. 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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