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Lentil Soup

A simple lentil soup made with lentils, water, onion, suet, salt, pepper, optional mint, served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,221 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lentils in several waters and soak for 1 hour.

  2. Peel and slice the onion.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the suet in a saucepan and fry the onion until soft but not browned.

  2. Add the soaked lentils and cover with cold water.

  3. Cook gently until the lentils are tender.

  4. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve back into the saucepan.

  5. Add salt and warm the soup before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried or toasted bread cut into even slices.

  2. Sprinkle dried chopped mint on top 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 + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,221 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + minttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,372 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Lentils + minttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together84 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they break down during cooking.
Suet
Adds fat for frying the onion and gives the soup a rich, mellow flavour.
Onion
Builds a sweet, savoury base as it softens in the fat.

The step that matters

Fry the onion until soft but not browned. Browning turns the onion bitter and darkens the soup, while gentle softening releases sweetness and builds a mild, even base flavour.

Swap the mint

The recipe marks mint as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, onion, pepper):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, onion, 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.

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