Name: Eel Pie
Ingredients: 2 pounds eels, skinned and cleaned; Salt, to taste; Pepper, to taste; 1 teaspoon dried sage; Water, enough to cover the eels; 1 recipe puff pastry

Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. 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

Cut the eels into pieces about 1.5 inches long.
Season the eels with salt, pepper, and dried sage.

Assemble and bake

Place the eels in a dish and add enough water to just cover them.
Prepare the puff pastry and cover the dish with it.
Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until the crust is golden.

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 + sagetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eels: Form the main filling, becoming tender and flaky as they cook under the pastry.
Puff pastry: Forms a crisp, golden crust that seals the dish and browns in the oven.
Dried sage: Adds an earthy, aromatic herbal flavour to the eels.

“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.