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Lentil Soup

A hearty soup of lentils, meat, potatoes, and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and potato work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 151 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rinse the lentils and soak them in water for a few hours.

Cook the soup

  1. In a pot, combine the soaked lentils, meat, and diced potatoes.

  2. Add enough water to cover the ingredients and bring to a boil.

  3. Reduce heat and simmer until the lentils and potatoes are tender.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with bread.

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 + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  4. Potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Lentils + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together77 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
Soften during simmering to form the body of the soup and thicken the broth.
Potatoes
Release starch as they cook, adding body and thickening the broth.
Meat
Adds savory flavor and richness to the broth as it cooks.

The step that matters

Simmer until tender. Keep the heat low so the liquid stays at a gentle simmer. Lentils and potatoes need time to soften fully, and a hard boil can break them apart and make the soup cloudy. Pulses stay firm if undercooked, so test for tenderness before serving.

Swap the lentils

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, potato, bread):

  1. Peanutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Peasfits better
  4. Lentilsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, potato, bread. 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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