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Lentil Soup

A hearty soup made with red lentils, vegetables, butter, and a flour‑milk roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 109 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Wash the lentils well.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the vegetables, and fry for about 5 minutes.

  3. Add the cold water and let the soup simmer for 1 hour.

  4. Stir in the pepper and salt.

Finish and thicken

  1. Rub the mixture through a wire sieve and return it to the saucepan.

  2. Bring it to a boil.

  3. Mix the flour and milk smoothly together, then pour it into the boiling soup.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lentils + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lentils + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together255 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

Red lentils
Break down during simmering to give the soup body and a thick, smooth texture.
Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables and carries flavour during the initial frying.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it boils, adding body to the liquid.
Milk
Adds richness and creaminess, softening the flavour of the soup.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, building the base flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and milk mixture. Flour clumps if added dry or unmixed. Blending it smoothly with cold milk first lets the starch disperse, so it thickens evenly when poured into the boiling soup instead of forming lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, butter, turnip, carrot, pepper, flour, milk):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, butter, turnip, carrot, pepper, flour, milk. 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 →

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