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Lentil Purée À LA Soubise

A smooth lentil purée flavored with caramelized onions and optional spinach or burnt sugar coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 132 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Purée À LA Soubise

Ingredients

Directions

Make the lentil base

  1. Rinse the lentils and boil them in water for about 4 hours until soft.

  2. Skim off any dark film that rises to the surface.

  3. Strain the soup through a wire sieve, rubbing the contents through to create a smooth texture.

Add the onions

  1. In a separate pan, slice and fry the onions in butter until brown.

  2. Boil the fried onions in some of the lentil broth until tender, then strain and add to the soup.

Finish and serve

  1. If desired, color the soup with spinach extract or burnt sugar.

  2. Stir the soup constantly while warming to prevent settling and burning.

  3. Before serving, stir the soup in the tureen with a ladle.

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 + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + spinachtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green or red lentils
Break down into a thick, smooth body when boiled and rubbed through a sieve.
Onions
Add sweetness and a deeper flavor when fried until brown and then simmered until tender.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the onions brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Stir the soup constantly while warming. Puréed lentils and onions are dense and settle quickly, so they scorch on the base of the pan. Constant stirring keeps the solids suspended and heats them evenly.

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, onion, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, onion, butter. 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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