Skip to main content
Preserve

Eel Pie

A pie made with eels, seasoned with pepper, sea salt, dried sage, and baked in puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Cut the eels into pieces about 1.5 inches long.

  2. Season the eels with pepper, coarse sea salt, and dried sage.

  3. Place the seasoned eels in a dish and add enough water to just cover them.

Bake

  1. Prepare a puff pastry and cover the dish with it.

  2. 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.

  1. 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
Provide the main protein, whose firm flesh holds its shape during baking and gently cooks in the liquid.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden crust that seals the dish and browns in the oven.
Dried sage
Adds an earthy, aromatic flavour that complements the richness of the eels.

The step that matters

Bake until the crust is golden. The pastry must be fully baked through, not just browned on top, because puff pastry relies on steam from its layered butter to rise and set. Underbaking leaves it doughy and soggy where it touches the liquid.

“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

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes