Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Eels

Stewed eels with onion, cloves, sweet herbs, mace, pepper, lemon juice, butter, flour, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Wash the eels well and cut them into pieces 2 to 3 inches long.

Stew

  1. Place the eels in a pan with the onion, cloves, sweet herbs, mace, and whole pepper in a muslin rag.

  2. Add enough water to cover the eels and let them stew softly.

  3. After some time, add the juice of ½ lemon and butter rolled in flour.

  4. When the eels are tender, remove the onion, cloves, herbs, mace, and pepper.

Season and serve

  1. Season with coarse sea salt to taste and serve with the sauce.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Onion + peppertop 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 protein, which becomes tender through slow, gentle stewing.
Butter
Adds richness and body to the sauce, carrying flavour and smoothness.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce when rolled with butter and stirred in.
Juice of ½ lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Stewing softly until the eels are tender. Eel flesh toughens and falls apart if boiled hard, so a gentle simmer keeps it intact while collagen slowly softens it.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, pepper, lemon, butter, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, pepper, lemon, butter, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes