Skip to main content
Main

Fried Eels

Fried eels are small eels coated in beaten egg and breadcrumbs, then fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fried Eels

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the gills from the eels and curl them round.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip the eels in beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs.

  2. Heat oil in a pan over medium-high heat.

  3. Fry the eels until golden brown and cooked through.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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 turns firm and flaky when cooked through.
Egg
Binds the bread crumbs to the eels so the coating stays on during frying.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns in the hot oil.

The step that matters

Frying the coated eels. Oil must be hot enough to brown the crumb coating quickly; if it is too cool, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy before the eels are cooked through.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes