Name: Boiled Eels
Ingredients: small eels; water; large bunch of parsley; butter

Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Boiled Eels

Ingredients

small eels
water
large bunch of parsley
butter

Directions

Prepare

Choose small eels for boiling.

Cook

Place them in a stewpan with the parsley and enough water to cover them.
Simmer until tender.

Serve

Remove the eels, pour a little parsley and butter over them, and serve some in a tureen.

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.

Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Small eels: The main ingredient, cooked whole by simmering until tender.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, carried by the parsley liquor over the cooked eels.
Large bunch of parsley: Flavours the cooking water and gives an aromatic, herbal taste to the eels.

“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.