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To Broil Eels

A dish of eel fillets stuffed with seasoned meat, wrapped in skin, and broiled, served with butter, anchovy, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

To Broil Eels

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eel

  1. Skin the eel and clean it thoroughly.

  2. Open the belly and cut the eel into four pieces.

Make the filling

  1. Take the tail end, strip off the flesh, and beat it in a mortar.

  2. Season the flesh with beaten mace, nutmeg, pepper, salt, parsley, thyme, lemon peel, and bread crumbs.

  3. Mix in the butter and egg yolk, then roll it up and fill three pieces of the belly with the mixture.

Wrap and broil

  1. Wrap the pieces in the skin of the eel and sew it up.

  2. Broil the wrapped eel pieces until cooked through.

  3. Serve with butter, an anchovy, and lemon juice.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 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

Eel
Forms the main body of the dish, and its flesh is the base for the filling.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help bind the seasoned flesh into a firm filling.
Egg yolk
Binds the filling together and adds richness as it sets during cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture to the filling, keeping it tender as it cooks.
Lemon peel
Adds bright aromatic flavour that cuts through the richness of the eel.

The step that matters

Wrapping and sewing the eel pieces. The skin must enclose the filling tightly so it does not leak or dry out under the broiler. Loose wrapping lets the filling escape and the exposed surfaces overcook.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (nutmeg, pepper, parsley, thyme, lemon, bread, butter):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, pepper, parsley, thyme, lemon, bread, butter. 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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