Skip to main content
Main

Lentil Turnovers

A baked pastry filled with lentil and mushroom mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lentil Turnovers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Pick and wash the lentils.

  2. Cook the lentils in just enough water to absorb.

  3. Peel and wash the mushrooms.

  4. Chop the mushrooms and onion.

  5. Fry the mushrooms and onion in butter.

  6. Add the fried mixture to the cooking lentils with lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

  7. Wait until the lentils are soft.

  8. Let the mixture cool to form a firm purée.

Make the pastry

  1. Make a paste with wheatmeal, butter, and a little water.

  2. Roll the paste out thin.

  3. Cut the paste into 4‑inch squares.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place some lentil mixture on each square.

  2. Moisten the edges of each square.

  3. Fold over the squares.

  4. Press to seal the turnovers.

  5. Bake for 15 minutes in a floured tin.

  6. Serve with brown sauce, vegetables, and potatoes.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  5. Lentils + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together249 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

Lentils
Form the bulk of the filling, and as they cook and cool they set into a firm purée.
Mushrooms
Add savoury moisture and earthy flavour to the filling as they soften in butter.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour when frying the vegetables, and fat to the pastry for tenderness.
Allinson fine wheatmeal
Forms the paste that wraps the filling, providing the structure of the turnover casing.

The step that matters

Let the lentil mixture cool fully before filling. Lentils firm up as they cool. Filling the pastry while the mixture is still hot and loose can make it soften the paste, leak, and tear when folded and sealed.

Swap the lentils

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

  1. Sesamefits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, onion, butter, lemon, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes