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Stewed Eels

A stew of eels cooked with butter, onion, flour, pepper, salt, bay leaf, lemon peel, and stock, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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. Skin the eels and cut them into 2‑inch pieces.

  2. Wash the eels in salt water and dry them with a cloth.

Make the sauce

  1. In a 3‑pint stewpan, melt the butter and add the shredded onion. Cook until soft.

  2. Stir in the flour, pepper, and salt.

  3. Add the onion with cloves, bay leaf or bouquet garni, and lemon peel.

  4. Add the eel pieces and fry until nicely colored, stirring constantly.

  5. Pour in the stock and simmer gently until the eels are cooked through.

Serve

  1. Remove the eels and arrange them on a dish.

  2. Strain the sauce over them.

  3. Serve with toasted bread cut into triangles around the dish.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
The main ingredient, giving the dish its body and central flavor as they simmer in the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the eel pieces brown when fried.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce that coats the eels.
Stock
Forms the liquid of the sauce and keeps the eels moist while they simmer.
Onion
Adds sweetness and savory depth as it softens in the butter.

The step that matters

Frying the eels until nicely colored. Stirring constantly keeps the flour and butter from scorching while the eel surfaces brown, which builds savory flavor. Burnt flour turns the sauce bitter.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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