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Soup

Pepper-Water Soup

A soup made with black pepper, pink lentils, bay leaves, tamarind, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and cumin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 308 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pepper-Water Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the paste

  1. Fry black pepper, pink lentils, and bay leaves in ghee.

  2. Grind the mixture to a fine paste.

Make the soup

  1. Mix tamarind pulp with water and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the ground paste and let it boil two or three times.

  3. Stir in fried mustard, cumin, and fenugreek seeds, and add salt to taste.

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 + cumintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lentils + fenugreektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tamarind + fenugreektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Tamarind + cumintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Cumin + fenugreektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together178 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

Black pepper
Provides the main sharp, pungent heat and aroma of the soup.
Pink lentils
Thicken the soup and add body once ground into the paste.
Tamarind pulp
Adds sourness that balances the heat of the pepper.

The step that matters

Grinding the fried mixture to a fine paste. A smooth, fine paste dissolves evenly into the boiling liquid. Coarse pieces stay gritty and release their flavour unevenly, so the soup can taste patchy.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, lentils, ghee, tamarind, cumin, fenugreek):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Okrafits about as well
  4. Capsicumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, lentils, ghee, tamarind, cumin, fenugreek. 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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