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Eel Soup

A soup made from small eels simmered with water, bread crust, mace, pepper, onion, sweet herbs, and optional carrot, finished with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Eel Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Clean the eels and place them in a pot with water, bread crust, mace, whole pepper, onion, and sweet herbs.

  2. Cover and simmer until the eels are completely broken down.

  3. Strain the mixture to separate the soup from the solids.

Serve

  1. Toast the bread and cut it into dice.

  2. Pour the boiling soup over the toasted bread.

  3. For a richer flavor, mix the cream with flour until smooth and stir it into the soup before serving.

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 + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + carrottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Break down during simmering to give the soup its body and savoury flavour.
Rich cream
Adds fat and richness, softening the broth's flavour and giving a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Mixed with cream to thicken the soup slightly and keep the cream from separating.
Bread for toasting
Toasted dice soak up the hot broth and give the soup a contrasting crisp-soft texture.

The step that matters

Simmering the eels until completely broken down. Gentle simmering extracts flavour and gelatin from the bones and flesh; boiling hard can cloud the broth and make it greasy, while stopping early leaves the soup thin and weakly flavoured.

Swap the carrot

The recipe marks carrot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, mace, pepper, onion, cream, flour):

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, mace, pepper, onion, cream, flour. 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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