Skip to main content
Main

Eel Soup

A soup made from small eels, butter, parsley, water, bread crust, mace, pepper, onion, sweet herbs, cream or milk, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Eel Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eels

  1. Skin the eels and bone 1 or 2.

  2. Cut them into very small pieces.

  3. Fry the pieces lightly in a stewpan with butter and parsley.

Make the soup

  1. Add water, bread crust, mace, whole pepper, onion, and sweet herbs.

  2. Cover and stew until the fish separates from the bones.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Pound it to a paste.

  5. Pass it through a sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Toast bread.

  2. Cut it into dice.

  3. Pour the boiling soup over it.

  4. Add the scallops of eel.

  5. Serve.

  6. Mix cream or milk with flour, then add it.

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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main body and savoury flavour of the soup.
Butter
Fat that carries flavour during the light frying of the eel pieces.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness to the stock as it stews.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the finished soup.
Flour
Thickens the cream or milk so the soup becomes slightly more body.

The step that matters

Mixing the cream or milk with flour. Flour clumps when it meets liquid unevenly. Blending it smoothly with the cream or milk first lets it disperse, so the soup thickens evenly without lumps.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, bread, pepper, onion, cream, flour):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, bread, 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.

More eel soup recipes

Conger 4 See all 77 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes