Skip to main content
Main

Lentil Soup

A lentil soup made with mutton broth, butter, flour, and optional curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lentils and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 255 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lentil Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Add the lentils to the mutton broth and simmer for 10 minutes.

  2. Cream together the butter and flour, then add to the soup.

  3. Season delicately with salt, pepper, and curry powder if desired.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lentils + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

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

  5. Mutton + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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
Provide the main body and bulk of the soup, softening into the broth.
Butter and flour
Creamed together to thicken the soup and add richness and a smoother texture.
Mutton broth
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor of the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour. Lumps form if the flour is added directly to hot liquid. Creaming it with butter first coats the flour particles so they disperse evenly and thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the lentils

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Beansfits about as well
  3. Walnutfits about as well
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, mutton, butter, pepper. 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.

More lentil soup recipes

Red 5Carrot 3Green 3 See all 136 →

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipesCurried MuttonCurried Mutton9 recipes