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Eel Soup with Two Eggs

A soup made from eels, salt pork, water, onion, celery, and thickened with flour, milk, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Eel Soup with Two Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eels

  1. Clean, skin, and remove fat from the eels.

  2. Fry the eels in drippings from the salt pork for 5 minutes.

Make the soup

  1. Add water, onion, celery (or seeds), salt, and pepper; boil until tender, about 1 hour.

  2. Remove eels to a tureen and strain the soup back into the kettle.

  3. Thicken the soup with a beaten egg mixed with flour and milk.

Serve

  1. Pour the thickened soup over the eels in the tureen.

  2. Slice the hard-boiled eggs and add them to the tureen.

  3. Garnish with chopped parsley if desired and serve with toasted 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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main body and rich flavor of the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it is cooked with the liquid.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softness to the thickened soup.
Eggs
Add richness and body to the thickened soup, and are served sliced as a garnish.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with the egg, flour, and milk mixture. Adding a thickener to hot liquid can clump if it is not blended smoothly first. Mixing the flour and milk into a smooth paste before adding it keeps the soup evenly thickened.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, onion, celery, pepper, flour, milk, egg):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, onion, celery, pepper, flour, milk, 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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