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Eel Pie

A baked pie of eels seasoned with pepper and salt, finished with a sauce of stock, lemon juice, and trimmings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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

Prepare the eels

  1. Skin, wash and trim the eels.

  2. Cut the eels into pieces about three inches long.

  3. Season the eels well with pepper and salt, leaving out the heads and tails.

Assemble the pie

  1. Add a little clear broth.

  2. Cover with paste.

  3. Brush the paste with egg yolk.

  4. Bake until done.

  5. Make a hole in the center.

  6. Pour in the sauce through a funnel.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the trimmings in half a pint of white stock.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

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

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

  3. Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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
Form the main filling, providing the flesh that cooks through and gives the pie its substance.
Paste
Forms the crust that encloses the filling and seals in moisture while baking.
Egg yolk
Brushed on the paste, it promotes a richer golden browning during baking.
White stock
Simmered with the trimmings to make the savoury sauce poured into the pie.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the seasoning of the sauce.

The step that matters

Pour in the sauce through a funnel. Adding the sauce after baking through a hole in the crust lets it stay liquid and well seasoned, rather than being absorbed or boiled away by the filling as it bakes.

“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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