Name: Eel Pie
Ingredients: 3 eels, cut into 3-inch pieces; pepper, to taste; coarse sea salt, to taste; butter, for greasing; pie crust

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Eel Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Season the eel pieces with pepper and salt.
Grease a dish with butter.
Lay the seasoned eel pieces in the dish.

Cover and bake

Cover the eels with pie crust.
Bake until the crust is golden brown.

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.

Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eels: Forms the main filling, becoming tender and rich as it cooks under the crust.
Pie crust: Encloses the eels and browns in the oven, giving a crisp golden top.

“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.