Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Lentils and Bacon

A lentil stew cooked with bacon, onion, bouquet garni, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stewed Lentils and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lentils

  1. Soak the lentils in cold water for 3 hours.

  2. Boil the lentils in a saucepan with plenty of cold water for 30 minutes, then strain them.

  3. Return the lentils to the saucepan and cover with barley-water.

Stew and season

  1. Add the onion with cloves and the bouquet garni.

  2. Scrape and trim the bacon or salt pork, blanching it for a few minutes if desired.

  3. Add the bacon to the saucepan with the lentils and simmer until the lentils are fully cooked.

  4. Season with pepper, salt, and chopped parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve the lentils on a dish with the bacon on top.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Lentils + barleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 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
Form the bulk of the dish and, as they cook, thicken the liquid and give it body.
Bacon or salt pork
Adds savory fat and salty flavor that seasons the lentils as they simmer.
Barley-water
Cooking liquid that adds a mild starchy body to the stew.

The step that matters

Simmer until the lentils are fully cooked. Lentils that are undercooked stay firm and gritty, while overcooking makes them mushy. Cooking in liquid that is not yet salted helps the skins soften evenly, so check tenderness by tasting rather than relying on time alone.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, pork, clove, pepper, parsley, barley):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, pork, clove, pepper, parsley, barley. 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

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesCream of Barley SoupCream of Barley Soup10 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes