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Stewed Eels

A stew of silver eels simmered in beef gravy, thickened with flour and flavored with port wine, mushroom catsup, lemon juice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Stewed Eels

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the beef gravy in a stewpan.

  2. Wash the eels and cut them into 2-inch pieces.

Stew and thicken

  1. Add the eels to the boiling gravy and let them simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Carefully remove the eels with a fish slice and set aside.

  3. Mix the flour, pepper, salt, port wine, mushroom catsup, lemon juice, and water until smooth.

  4. Strain this mixture into the gravy, stirring until it boils.

  5. Let it boil for 10 minutes, then return the eels to heat through.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  4. Port wine + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together570 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Silver eels
Provide the main protein, which becomes tender as they simmer gently in the gravy.
Beef gravy
Forms the savoury liquid base that the eels cook in and the sauce is built on.
Flour
Thickens the mixture into a smooth sauce that coats the eels.
Port wine
Adds depth, sweetness and acidity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Strain the flour mixture into the gravy and boil. The flour must be fully smooth before it goes in, and the sauce must boil so the starch swells and thickens; lumps or a weak boil leave the sauce thin or grainy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, port wine, pepper, mushroom):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, port wine, pepper, mushroom. 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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