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Boiled Eels with Browned Butter

Boiled eels served with browned butter, parsley, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Eels with Browned Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the eels

  1. Boil the eels in stock with salt and pepper until cooked through.

  2. Remove the eels and place them on a napkin.

Serve

  1. Serve the eels with browned butter and minced parsley.

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

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

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Main protein; its flesh firms and becomes flaky as it cooks through.
Stock
Cooking liquid that gently poaches the eels and carries savory flavor into them.
Browned butter
Adds rich fat and a nutty, toasted aroma to the finished eels.

The step that matters

Boil until cooked through, then remove promptly. Prolonged heat keeps squeezing moisture out of the eel proteins, so they turn dry and tough. Lifting them out as soon as they are cooked through keeps the flesh tender.

“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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