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Eel Soup

A soup made from eels, water, bread, mace, pepper, onion, sweet herbs, and optional brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Eel Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Remove gills from eels and cut into pieces.

  2. In a pot, combine eels, water, bread, mace, pepper, onion, and sweet herbs.

  3. Cover and boil until half the liquid is reduced.

  4. Strain the soup.

Serve

  1. Toast some bread, cutting it into small pieces.

  2. Place the toasted bread in a dish and pour the soup over it.

  3. Heat the dish over a stove for a minute and serve hot.

  4. If the soup is not rich enough, add a little brown gravy.

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

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

  2. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

  3. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Mace + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main flesh and savory body of the soup.
Water
Forms the liquid base that extracts flavor during boiling.
Bread
Thickens the soup slightly and soaks up liquid when served over toast.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Boil until half the liquid is reduced. Reducing the liquid concentrates flavor and gelatin from the eels, so the soup tastes rich rather than watery. Boiling too hard or too long can make it cloudy and overly salty-tasting.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

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