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Curried Lentils

A lentil dish cooked with butter, onions, curry powder, and stock, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,221 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Curried Lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lentils and soak them.

Cook the lentils

  1. Drain and cook the lentils in the stock or water for one hour until they form a dry mass.

Fry the onions

  1. Melt the butter in a pan, add sliced onions and curry powder, and fry until the onions are brown.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the cooked lentils to the pan, season with salt, and heat through.

  2. Serve with boiled rice.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Lentils + buttertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together486 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Provide the main body and protein-rich bulk of the dish, setting into a thick, dry mass when cooked.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the curry powder's flavour and helping the onions brown.
Onions
Soften and brown in the fat, adding sweetness and depth to the base.
Curry powder
Supplies the aromatic spice flavour, released and toasted when fried in butter.
Vegetable stock or water
Hydrates and cooks the lentils, carrying flavour into them as they simmer.

The step that matters

Cooking the lentils until they form a dry mass. Lentils need enough liquid to cook through evenly, but the mixture must be drained and reduced to a dry mass so it does not turn soggy when combined with the fried onions and heated through.

Swap the lentils

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

  1. Sesamefits better
  2. Peanutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion. 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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