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Dried Conger Eels, High Flavoured

A preserved eel dish made by marinating and drying conger eels with spices, sugar, salt, and alcohol.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Dried Conger Eels, High Flavoured

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eels

  1. Skin the eels, remove heads, tails, and fins, and split them open at the belly.

  2. Clean the eels thoroughly and cut them into 4-inch pieces.

Cure the eels

  1. Rub the pieces with cloves, mace, nutmeg, bay leaves, and coarse sugar.

  2. Let them marinate for 24 hours, turning occasionally.

  3. Add coarse sea salt and continue rubbing for another day.

  4. Rub the pieces with bruised juniper berries, shallots, and table salt.

  5. Repeat this process twice a day for two days.

  6. Wipe the pieces dry and hang them in a well-ventilated area until dry.

Wrap and age

  1. Wrap each piece in calico soaked in whisky or rum, saturating the backbone.

  2. Tie with narrow tape and hang to dry for one night.

  3. Coat with gelatine composition and let cure for two months.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil in the wrappers 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.

  1. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Nutmeg + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the firm, fatty flesh that the cure and smoke-like drying preserve and flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and preserves the flesh during curing.
Coarse sugar
Balances the salt and softens the sharp edge of the spice cure.
Cloves
Adds warm aromatic flavour that penetrates the flesh during curing.
Table salt
Adds further salinity to the cure, helping dry and preserve the flesh.
Whisky or rum
Adds alcohol and aroma to the calico wrapping during drying.

The step that matters

Wiping the pieces dry before hanging. Surface moisture left on the eels slows drying and can let spoilage organisms grow, so the pieces must be fully dry before they hang in ventilated air.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, nutmeg, sugar, shallot, pepper, whisky):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, nutmeg, sugar, shallot, pepper, whisky. 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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