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Eel Soup

A soup made from small eels, butter, parsley, water, bread crust, mace, pepper, onion, sweet herbs, cream or milk, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Eel Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eels

  1. Skin the eels.

  2. Bone 1 or 2 of the eels.

  3. Cut the eels into very small pieces.

Make the soup

  1. Fry the pieces lightly in a stewpan with butter and parsley.

  2. Add water, bread crust, mace, whole pepper, onion, and sweet herbs.

  3. Cover the pot.

  4. Simmer until the fish breaks from the bones.

  5. Strain the mixture.

  6. Pound the strained mixture to a paste.

  7. Pass the paste through a sieve.

  8. Mix cream or milk with flour until smooth.

  9. Add the mixture to the soup.

Serve

  1. Toast bread.

  2. Cut the toasted bread into dice.

  3. Pour the boiling soup over the toasted bread.

  4. Add the scallops of eel.

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

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

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 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 body of the soup, and their flesh breaks down into the paste that thickens it.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow body to the finished soup.
Flour
Thickens the cream or milk so it blends smoothly into the soup.
Bread
Soaks up the hot soup and gives the dish its toasted, textured base.

The step that matters

Adding the cream and flour mixture. Flour mixed with cold liquid must be smooth before it goes in, or it forms lumps. Stirring it into the hot soup then thickens it evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, bread, pepper, onion, cream, flour):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, bread, pepper, onion, cream, 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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