Name: Eel Broth
Ingredients: ½ pound small eels; 3 pints water; parsley; 1 slice onion; a few peppercorns; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Parsley and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Eel Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Clean the eels and place them in a pot with water, parsley, onion, and peppercorns.
Simmer until the eels are broken and the broth is flavorful.
Add salt to taste and strain the broth.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,843 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Small eels: Break down during simmering to release savory flavor and body into the broth.
Water: Acts as the cooking liquid that extracts flavor from the eels and aromatics.
Onion: Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the broth as it simmers.

“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.