Skip to main content
Main

Eel Pie

A pastry pie filled with eels, seasoned with pepper and salt, baked and topped with a lemon‑flavored sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. 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. Skin, wash, and trim the fins from the eels.

  2. Cut the eels into 3‑inch pieces.

  3. Season the eel pieces with pepper and salt.

  4. Place the seasoned eel pieces in a dish, omitting heads and tails.

  5. Add ½ cup of water or veal broth to the dish.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the trimmings in ½ pint of veal stock.

  2. Season the sauce with pepper and salt.

  3. Add lemon juice to the sauce.

  4. Thicken the sauce with a mixture of flour and water.

  5. Strain the sauce.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the dish with pastry.

  2. Brush the pastry top with egg yolk.

  3. Decorate the pastry with extra pastry.

  4. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour.

  5. Make a hole in the center of the baked pie.

  6. Pour the sauce into the hole through a funnel.

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

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

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 meaty filling that becomes tender during the long baking.
Veal stock
Adds savory depth to the sauce that fills the pie after baking.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it becomes body-rich rather than watery.
Egg yolk
Brushed on the pastry to promote browning and a glossy golden finish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich fish and stock flavors of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour and water. Flour must be mixed smoothly with water before it goes into the hot liquid, otherwise it clumps. Stirring the slurry in gradually and then straining the sauce keeps it smooth and evenly thickened.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes