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Stewed Lentils

A hearty stew of lentils cooked with butter, onion, eschalots, parsley, and salt, finished with a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 322 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and soak the lentils in cold water for 1–2 hours.

  2. In a pot, combine lentils with 2 quarts cold water, 1 ounce butter, eschalots, sliced onion, chopped parsley, and salt.

  3. Simmer for about 2 hours until tender.

  4. Drain the lentils in a sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. In a saucepan, melt 2 ounces butter with a little flour, then add the lentils and stir well over heat.

  2. Boil gently for 10 minutes.

  3. Serve on a flat dish with a border of mashed potatoes or in a deep dish.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lentils + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together255 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Form the main body of the dish and, once cooked, give it a soft, tender texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the lentils.
Flour
Thickens the butter and the cooking liquid so the lentils become a stew rather than watery.
Onion
Contributes savoury sweetness and aroma as it softens during cooking.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 10 minutes after adding the lentils. Flour needs to be cooked for the thickening to set and lose its raw taste; a hard boil can break the lentils apart and make the stew gluey, so a gentle simmer keeps the texture intact.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, butter, parsley, flour. 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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