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Lentil Turnovers

A baked pastry filled with lentils, mushrooms, onions, and lemon, served with sauce and vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lentil Turnovers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Pick and wash the lentils.

  2. Cook the lentils in just enough water to absorb.

  3. Peel and wash the mushrooms.

  4. Chop the mushrooms and onion finely.

  5. Fry the mushrooms and onion in butter.

  6. Add the fried mushrooms and onion to the cooking lentils, along with lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

  7. Wait until the lentils are soft.

  8. Let the mixture cool.

Make and bake the turnovers

  1. Make a dough with the flour, butter, and a little water.

  2. Roll the dough out thin.

  3. Cut the dough into 4-inch squares.

  4. Place some lentil mixture on each square.

  5. Moisten the edges.

  6. Fold over.

  7. Press to seal.

  8. Bake the turnovers in a floured tin at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the turnovers with brown sauce, vegetables, and potatoes.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lentils + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together38 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Lentils + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,221 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 bulk of the filling, becoming soft and absorbing liquid as they cook.
Mushrooms
Add moisture and savory, earthy flavor to the filling.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savory depth when fried with the mushrooms.
Butter
Enriches the dough with fat, giving it tenderness and a richer flavor.
Fine wheat flour
Provides the structure of the dough that encloses the filling.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before filling the dough. Hot filling softens the dough, making it tear and seep when folded and sealed. Cooling lets the lentils firm slightly and keeps the edges sealable.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, mushroom, butter, lemon, pepper, wheat, flour):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, mushroom, butter, lemon, pepper, wheat, flour. 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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