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Eels with Cream Sauce and Capers

A dish of fried eels served with a creamy sauce flavored with capers, parsley, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Eels with Cream Sauce and Capers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the eels until cooked through.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, cream, butter, parsley, flour, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  2. Boil the mixture, stirring until thickened.

  3. Add capers to the sauce just before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve the fried eels topped with the cream 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. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Capers + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main protein, which is cooked through by frying.
Flour
Thickens the milk and cream mixture into a smooth sauce as it boils.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, giving it a smooth texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, thinned with cream and thickened by flour.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the sauce, helping it feel smooth on the palate.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the cream.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce while stirring until thickened. Flour needs to reach a boil and be stirred constantly so its starch swells evenly; otherwise the sauce can turn lumpy or stay thin.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour, cream, parsley, butter, pepper):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, cream, parsley, butter, pepper. 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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