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Boiled Eels

A boiled eel dish seasoned with lemon, mace, pepper, salt, parsley, and served with Dutch sauce, parsley, butter, lemon juice, or chili vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Eels

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the poaching liquid

  1. Pare the lemon and remove the white inner rind.

  2. Slice the lemon and remove the seeds.

  3. In a pot, combine the lemon, mace, white peppercorns, coarse sea salt, parsley, and cold water.

  4. Bring the mixture to a gentle boil and simmer for 20 minutes.

  5. Let the mixture cool completely.

Poach and serve

  1. Add the eels cut into 3-4 inch lengths to the pot and simmer gently for 10-15 minutes.

  2. Lift the eels with a slotted spoon into a hot dish.

  3. Serve with Dutch sauce, parsley and butter with lemon juice, or chili vinegar.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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, becoming firm and flaky when gently poached in the seasoned liquid.
Lemon
Adds bright acidity and aroma that perfume the poaching liquid and cut the richness of the eel.
Parsley
Contributes a fresh, herbal aroma to the poaching liquid.

The step that matters

Simmer the eels gently. A rolling boil toughens and breaks up delicate eel flesh, while a gentle simmer cooks it evenly and keeps it moist and intact.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, parsley):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, parsley. 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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