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Richmond Eel Pie

A savory pie made with eels, mushrooms, onions, and a rich sauce, topped with egg yolks and baked in pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Richmond Eel Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the eels

  1. Wash the eels in salt and water, then dry them with a cloth.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter.

  2. Add the eels, mushrooms, parsley, onion or shallot, pepper, salt, bay leaf, lemon rind, sherry, and stock.

  3. Bring the sauce to a boil.

  4. Skim the sauce.

  5. Remove the eels once cooked, placing them in a pie dish.

  6. Strain the sauce.

  7. Thicken it with flour kneaded with butter.

  8. Add lemon juice.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour over the eels.

  2. Top with hard‑boiled egg yolks.

  3. Line the dish with pastry.

  4. Cover with more pastry.

  5. Brush with egg.

  6. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 1 hour.

  7. Serve hot or cold.

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

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

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

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Mushroom + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main flesh, which firms and becomes tender when gently simmered in the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, kneaded with flour, thickens it with a rich, smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the strained sauce so it coats the eels and sets as the pie cools.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the simmering sauce.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a creamy texture to the filling.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and moisture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the strained sauce before adding lemon juice. Flour kneaded with butter must be cooked into the hot liquid to swell and gelatinise the starch; undercooked flour leaves a raw, pasty taste and a thin sauce that will not hold together in the pie.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mushroom, parsley, pepper, lemon, sherry, 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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