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Eel Pie

A pie filled with eels seasoned with pepper, coarse sea salt, dried sage, and water, wrapped in puff pastry and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. 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

  1. Skin, gut, and wash the eels thoroughly.

  2. Cut the eels into 1.5-inch pieces.

  3. Season the eels with pepper, coarse sea salt, and dried sage.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the eels in a dish and add enough water to just cover them.

  2. Make puff pastry and cover the dish with it.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven 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 + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

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 flavorful as it cooks under the crust.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, flaky crust that browns in the oven and seals in moisture.
Dried sage
Adds an earthy, aromatic herbal flavor that complements the rich fish.

The step that matters

Bake until the crust is golden brown. Puff pastry relies on steam from its layered butter to rise and crisp. Underbaking leaves it pale and doughy, while the eels need the full heat to cook through beneath the crust.

“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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