Name: Eel Pie
Ingredients: fine eels; bread crumbs; sweet marjoram; handful of parsley; pepper; coarse sea salt; mace; beef gravy; puff pastry

Why it works: Marjoram and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,979 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Eel Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Clean, skin, and bone the eels, leaving the skin on if desired.
Lay each eel on a board, securing it with two forks, one in the head and one in the tail.
Open the eel down the back on each side of the bone without cutting through the flesh.
Cut off the heads and tails and set them aside.
Chop the herbs finely and mix them with bread crumbs, pepper, salt, and mace.
Strew the mixture over the eels, roll them into a circle, and place them in a dish.
In a saucepan, combine the heads and tails with beef gravy and season it; let it simmer.
Strain the gravy into the dish with the eels.
Once cooled, cover with a thick layer of puff pastry and bake as you would for other pies.

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.

Marjoram + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,979 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Marjoram + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,609 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Marjoram + macetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together767 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, marjoram, parsley, pepper, beef):

Thymefits better
Winter savoryfits better
Sagefits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, marjoram, parsley, pepper, beef. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.