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Eel Pie

A pie made with eels, seasoned with cayenne, black pepper, sea salt, water, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21,449 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

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. Cut the prepared eels into pieces.

  2. Season the eels with cayenne, black pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Pour enough water into the dish to nearly fill it.

Bake and finish

  1. Cover with a crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Remove the lid and pour in cream according to the size of the pie.

  3. Replace the crust immediately to mix the cream with the gravy.

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. Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Pepper and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main filling, becoming tender and flaky as they cook through.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the gravy, softening its flavour as it mixes in.
Water
Forms the base of the gravy that cooks with the eels under the crust.

The step that matters

Replace the crust immediately after adding the cream. Cream poured into a hot dish can be left sitting on top rather than blending. Covering it right away traps heat and steam so the cream mixes into the gravy evenly and the filling stays moist while it finishes cooking.

“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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