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Conger for Breakfast

A breakfast dish made from a conger eel, seasoned with salt and pepper, cured, then broiled and buttered.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Conger for Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the bone from the conger eel without dividing the fish.

  2. Rub salt and pepper into the meat side.

  3. Lay the fish open and fasten it on a wall in the shade to cure for two days.

Cook and serve

  1. Cut pieces off.

  2. Broil and butter them.

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. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Conger eel
Forms the main body of the dish, and its firm flesh holds its shape during curing and broiling.
Salt
Draws moisture out of the flesh during curing and seasons it, firming the texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the surface brown and stay moist under the broiler.

The step that matters

Curing the fish with salt in the shade. Salt draws water out of the flesh and firms its texture, so the cure's length and the amount of salt shape how moist and firm the cooked fish will be. Curing too long or with too much salt can leave it dry and overly salty.

“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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