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Breakfast Dal

A lentil dish cooked with onion, butter, water, and salt, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Breakfast Dal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sift, pick, and wash the Dal.

Cook

  1. Chop the onion finely and fry it in the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the washed Dal, water, and salt to the pan.

  3. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer gently for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Dal
Forms the main body of the dish, thickening into a soft, spoonable texture as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the onion and carries its flavor through the dish.
Onion
Builds savory depth and aroma as it softens and browns in the butter.

The step that matters

Simmering the Dal. Simmering gently with occasional stirring keeps the lentils from scorching on the bottom and breaking down unevenly. A hard boil can cause the pulses to split and stick, so the texture and flavor suffer.

“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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