Skip to main content
Main

Cheese and Lentil Savoury

A baked dish of lentils, cheese, onions, bread crumbs, and milk topped with rice and sugar, served with fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lentils and beans match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 135 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cheese and Lentil Savoury

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cook the lentils until tender.

  2. Chop the onion and sauté in margarine until soft.

Assemble and bake

  1. Mix the cooked lentils, sautéed onion, cheese, and bread crumbs together.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a baking dish.

  3. Pour milk over the top and sprinkle with rice and sugar.

  4. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with fruit.

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 + beanstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,017 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Onion + beanstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 bulk and body, holding the savory mixture together when cooked tender.
Cheese
Adds rich, savory flavour and helps bind the mixture.
Margarine
Adds fat that softens the onion and carries its flavour through the dish.
Onion
Sautéing softens it and builds a sweet, savory aroma.
Milk
Supplies moisture that cooks the rice and browns on the surface in the oven.
Rice
Absorbs the milk as it bakes, softening and adding body to the dish.

The step that matters

Bake until the rice is cooked through and the top is golden. Rice must absorb the poured milk and soften fully in the oven. Pulling the dish too early leaves firm grains, while the milk proteins and sugar brown on the surface as the dish finishes.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, lentils, bread, beans, milk, rice, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, lentils, bread, beans, milk, rice, sugar. 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

Rice and Cheese CasseroleRice and Cheese Casserole23 recipesCheese RiceCheese Rice12 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipes