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Eel Pie

A pie made with eels, butter, water, pepper, salt, and pie crust, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Eel Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Season the eels with pepper and salt.

  2. Place the eels in a dish with bits of butter and water.

  3. Cover the dish with pie crust.

Bake

  1. Bake until the crust 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 + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main filling, becoming tender and flavorful as they cook under the crust.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping flavor the eels and moisten the filling as it melts.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven, giving a crisp golden top.

The step that matters

Bake until the crust is golden brown. Baking long enough lets the eels cook through and the pastry set and brown. Pulling it early can leave the filling undercooked and the crust pale and doughy.

“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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