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
Curl the small eels round.
Dip them into beaten egg, then coat with crumbs of bread.
Fry and serve
Fry in hot oil until golden brown.
Season with coarse sea salt before serving.
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.
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Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Small eels
- Form the main body of the dish, cooking to a firm, flaky texture when fried.
- Egg
- Binds the bread crumbs to the eels so the coating holds during frying.
- Crumbs of bread
- Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns in hot oil.
The step that matters
Fry in hot oil until golden brown. The oil must be hot enough to crisp the crumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy and soggy before it browns.
“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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