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Eel Pie

A baked pie of eels seasoned with pepper and sea salt, topped with paste and egg yolk, served with a veal stock and lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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. Skin, wash, and trim the fins from the eels, then cut them into 3-inch pieces.

  2. Season the eel pieces with pepper and coarse sea salt, and place them in a dish, omitting the heads and tails.

  3. Add ½ cup of water or veal broth to the dish.

Bake the pie

  1. Cover the dish with paste.

  2. Brush the top with egg yolk.

  3. Decorate with additional paste.

  4. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour.

  5. After baking, make a hole in the center of the pie.

Make and add the sauce

  1. Boil the trimmings in ½ pint of veal stock.

  2. Season the broth with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

  4. Thicken the sauce with flour and water.

  5. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

  6. Pour the sauce into the hole.

  7. Add the hot sauce to the pie.

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 + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and flavourful as it cooks in the dish.
Paste
Forms the crust that covers the pie and seals in moisture while baking.
Egg yolk
Brushed on top, it helps the crust take on a golden, glossy browning.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it becomes smooth and clings to the pie filling.
Veal stock
Gives the sauce a rich, savoury meaty flavour built from the boiled trimmings.
Lemon juice
Adds a bright acidity that balances the richness of the veal sauce.

The step that matters

Pour the sauce in after baking, while it is hot. The sauce is added to the hot pie through the vent so it stays liquid and fills the filling without cooking the eels twice or making the crust soggy. Straining it first keeps the sauce smooth.

“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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