Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓
Boiled Eels
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Choose small eels for boiling.
Cook
Place eels in a pot with parsley and enough water to cover them.
Simmer until tender, about 1 hour.
Serve
Remove eels, pour a little melted butter and parsley over them, and serve in a tureen.
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.
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Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together28,563 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
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 as they simmer.
- Parsley
- Adds fresh, herbal aroma to the cooking water and the finished dish.
- Butter
- Adds richness and a smooth, glossy coating when poured over the cooked eels.
The step that matters
Simmer until tender. Eels need gentle, sustained simmering to become tender. Boiling too hard can toughen the flesh and break the eels apart, so keep the water at a quiet simmer.
“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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