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Stewed Eels

A stew of eels simmered with onion, garlic, herbs, mace, pepper, lemon, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stewed Eels

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the eels well and cut them into pieces 2-3 inches long.

  2. Place the eels in a pan with the onion, cloves, sweet herbs, mace, and whole pepper in a muslin rag.

Stew

  1. Add enough water to create a sauce and let them stew softly.

  2. Add the juice of ½ lemon and butter rolled in flour.

  3. When tender, remove the onion, cloves, herbs, mace, and pepper.

Season and serve

  1. Season with coarse sea salt to taste and serve with the sauce.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Are the main protein; they become tender and flaky as they stew gently in liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, carrying flavour and giving it a smooth body.
Flour
Rolled into the butter, it thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stew softly until tender. Eels need gentle, low heat in liquid to become tender. A hard boil can toughen and break the flesh, so keep the liquid barely simmering.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, pepper, lemon, butter, flour):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, pepper, lemon, butter, flour. 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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