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Stewed Eels a LA Francaise

Stewed eels simmered with parsley, thyme, onion, butter, lemon, pepper, salt, and water, finished with a thickened egg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stewed Eels a LA Francaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, skin, and cut the eels into 2-inch pieces.

  2. In a saucepan, combine eels, parsley, thyme, onion, butter, lemon juice, pepper, salt, and enough boiling water to cover.

  3. Cook gently until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove eels with a perforated spoon and keep warm.

  2. Strain the gravy, thicken with flour, and boil for 3 minutes.

  3. Beat 2 eggs, stir into the sauce quickly, and remove from heat before curdling.

  4. Pour sauce over the eels and serve.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming tender during gentle cooking.
Flour (in the method)
Thickens the strained gravy so it coats the eels.
Eggs (in the method)
Enrich and thicken the sauce as they set with gentle heat.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the gravy.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten eggs to the sauce. Egg proteins set with heat and can curdle if the sauce is too hot or stirred too slowly. Stirring quickly and removing the pan from heat before it curdles keeps the sauce smooth and thickened.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, thyme, butter, lemon, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, thyme, butter, lemon, pepper. 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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