Skip to main content
Main

Haricots and Lentile

A simple boiled dish of haricots and lentils cooked with butter or fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lentils and butter work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 486 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Haricots and Lentile

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the haricots thoroughly.

  2. In a black iron pot, combine the haricots and cold water.

  3. Add the butter or fat.

Cook

  1. Boil gently for three hours or until tender.

  2. If the haricots are good, the water will be nearly absorbed; draw off any remaining water.

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 + buttertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together486 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricots
Provide the starchy body of the dish, softening into a tender, creamy texture during long simmering.
Cold water
Provides the cooking liquid that hydrates the beans and softens them as they simmer.
Butter or fat
Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the cooked beans.

The step that matters

Boil gently for three hours. A gentle simmer softens the beans evenly while keeping their skins intact. A hard, rolling boil can split skins and break the beans apart, so keep the heat low enough that the surface only just moves.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes