Skip to main content
Main

Lentil Sausages

A vegetarian sausage made from lentils, potatoes, butter, breadcrumbs, eggs, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lentils and potato work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 151 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Sausages

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put the lentils into a pint of boiling water and boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the butter, pepper, and salt.

  3. Mash the potatoes and mix thoroughly with the lentils.

Shape and fry

  1. Add the breadcrumbs and eggs, then shape into sausages.

  2. Dip the sausages in egg and breadcrumbs, then fry in boiling butter for about 10 minutes.

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 + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Provide the main bulk and body, holding the sausage together as they soften and mash.
Potatoes
Add starch and moisture that bind the mixture and give a soft, tender interior.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when cooked, helping the sausages hold their shape.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb moisture and form a crisp, golden coating when fried.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and helps the outside brown when frying.

The step that matters

Shape and fry the sausages. If the mixture is too wet, the sausages will fall apart; the egg and breadcrumb coating helps them hold together and brown evenly in the hot butter.

Swap the lentils

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Peasfits better
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, butter, egg, 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

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes