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Stewed Eels

A savory stew of eels simmered with onion, butter, flour, spices, and stock, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 the eels

  1. Skin and cut the eels into 2-inch pieces, then wash them in salt water.

  2. Dry the eels with a cloth.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a 3-pint stewpan and add the shredded onion, cooking until the onion is soft.

  2. Stir in a little flour, pepper, and salt, along with the onion with cloves, bay leaf, and lemon peel.

  3. Add the eel pieces and fry until nicely colored, stirring constantly.

  4. Pour in the stock and simmer gently until the eels are cooked through.

Serve

  1. Arrange the eels on a dish and strain the sauce over them.

  2. Serve with toasted bread cut into triangles.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender as they simmer in the stock.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the onion soften and the eels brown.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma to the sauce as it softens in the butter.
Stock
Provides the liquid that cooks the eels and forms the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the eel pieces until nicely colored. Browning the eels in butter before adding stock builds deeper flavor through the Maillard reaction. Stirring constantly prevents the flour and butter from scorching on the pan.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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