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Eel Pie

A pie made with eels, stock, pepper, salt, lemon juice, and mushroom ketchup, baked with a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the eels

  1. Cut the eels into pieces 2 to 3 inches long, removing the heads and tails.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the eel pieces in the meat stock until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Strain out the heads and tails from the stock.

  3. Mix pepper, salt, lemon juice, and mushroom ketchup into the stock.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the eel pieces in a pie dish and pour the sauce over them.

  2. Cover with a pie crust and bake at 350°F (175°C) until 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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  3. Meat + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,423 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Lemon + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + ketchuptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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, which becomes tender when stewed until thoroughly cooked.
Meat stock
Carries the flavour and moisture of the sauce and cooks the eels.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the eel pieces until thoroughly cooked. Eel must be cooked through to be safe and tender. Stewing gently in the stock lets the flesh firm and cook evenly without breaking apart, while the stock absorbs flavour.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper, mushroom, ketchup):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Red currantfits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, mushroom, ketchup. 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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