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Eel Pie

A savory pie made with eels, spices, stock, wine, lemon pickle, and puff pastry.

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

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. Clean, skin, and wash the eels.

  2. Remove the heads and tails, and cut the eels into 2-3 inch pieces.

  3. Season the eels with black pepper, coarse sea salt, and grated nutmeg.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the eels in a dish and add white stock, white wine, and lemon pickle.

  2. Cover the edge of the dish with puff pastry and then cover the top with more puff pastry.

  3. Bake in a 400 °F (200 °C) oven until the pastry 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.

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

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. White wine + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Pepper + white winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 and become tender during baking in the liquid.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the rich eel flavour.
Lemon pickle
Adds sharp acidity and tang that cut through the richness of the eels.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky crust that rises and browns in the oven over the filling.
White stock
Provides moisture and savoury body for the filling as it cooks.

The step that matters

Bake until the pastry is golden brown. The pastry must be fully baked to become crisp and flaky. Underbaked puff pastry stays dense and doughy, while the filling needs enough heat to cook through under the crust.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, white wine, lemon):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, white wine, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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