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Eels, Tartar Fashion

A dish of eels cooked in a sauce of butter, onion, herbs, wine, and breadcrumbs, served with a tartare-style sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Eels, Tartar Fashion

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and sauté the onion, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, salt, and pepper.

  2. Add the white wine and let it stew for 30 minutes.

  3. Add the eel pieces to the sauce and cook until done.

Coat and broil

  1. Remove the eel and cover it with seasoned breadcrumbs.

  2. Dip the eel pieces in beaten egg yolks, then roll them again in breadcrumbs.

  3. Broil the eel pieces over gentle heat until golden brown.

  4. Serve with sauce à la Tartare.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Eel
Forms the main body of the dish and cooks through in the sauce.
Egg yolks
Adds richness and helps the breadcrumb coating stick to the eel.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp coating that browns under the broiler.
Butter
Carries the onion and herb flavors as it sautés.
White wine
Adds acidity and flavor as it stews into the sauce.
Onion
Sweetens and builds aroma as it softens in butter.

The step that matters

Broil the eel over gentle heat until golden brown. Gentle heat lets the breadcrumb coating brown while the eel cooks through. Intense heat can scorch the crumbs before the fish is done, and overcooked eel becomes dry and firm.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, thyme, pepper, white wine, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, thyme, pepper, white wine, egg. 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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