Name: Lentils, Boiled
Ingredients: 1 cup lentils; 1 tablespoon butter; coarse sea salt (to taste)

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 ↓

Lentils, Boiled

Ingredients

1 cup lentils
1 tablespoon butter
coarse sea salt (to taste)

Directions

Wash the lentils several times until clean.
Put them in a pot with cold water and boil gently until soft.
Strain the lentils, add the butter, and serve hot.

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.

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

Lentils: Provide the main body and starchy structure of the dish as they soften when simmered.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, giving the cooked lentils a smoother, rounder mouthfeel.

“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.