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Fried Eels

Fried eels simmered in stock, port wine, and seasoning, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Fried Eels

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eels

  1. Remove the gills from the eels and cut them into 3-4 inch pieces.

Fry and simmer

  1. Heat the butter in a pan and fry the eel pieces until golden.

  2. Transfer the fried eels to a stewpan and add stock, port wine, and seasoning.

  3. Simmer until tender.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Remove the eels and place them on a hot dish.

  2. Thicken the remaining stock with flour.

  3. Add lemon juice.

  4. Pour over the eels.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Port wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and flaky when simmered.
Butter
Fat for frying the eel pieces, adding richness and golden browning on the surface.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a sauce that coats the eels.
Port wine
Adds depth, mild sweetness and aroma to the simmering liquid.
Stock
Forms the cooking liquid and the base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer until tender. Eel needs gentle, sustained simmering to become tender; boiling hard can toughen the flesh and break the pieces apart, while stopping too early leaves it chewy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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