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Eels a LA Poulette

A French dish of eels stewed in a sauce of butter, flour, wine, water, herbs, mushrooms, lemon, onion, and egg yolk cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Eels a LA Poulette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eels

  1. Boil the eels in water with vinegar, then drain them.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt butter mixed with flour without burning it.

  2. Add white wine and boiling water to the butter mixture.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, sweet herbs, mushrooms, lemon juice, and onion.

  4. Stew the eels in this mixture for 30 minutes.

  5. Beat the egg yolks with cream and add to the stew, warming gently without boiling.

  6. Serve hot.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. White wine + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 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

Eels
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender as they stew in the sauce.
Butter and flour
Form a roux that thickens the wine and water into a smooth sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the finished sauce when gently warmed with cream.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce alongside the egg yolks.
White wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Warming the egg yolk and cream mixture. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat; if the stew boils after they are added, the proteins scramble, leaving the sauce grainy and curdled instead of smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, butter, flour, white wine, pepper, mushroom, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, butter, flour, white wine, pepper, mushroom, lemon. 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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