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A Remarkable Fine Fish Pie

A fish pie made with eels, anchovy, parsley, lemon peel, and butter, topped with fish and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Remarkable Fine Fish Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Cut the fins off the eels and boil them.

  2. Pick the flesh off the eels and add the bones to the boiling liquor with onion, mace, pepper, and salt.

  3. Boil until rich, then strain the liquid.

Make the forcemeat

  1. Make a forcemeat with the eel flesh, anchovy, parsley, lemon peel, salt, pepper, and warmed butter.

  2. Spread the forcemeat at the bottom of a dish.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer the fish on top, seasoned with salt and pepper.

  2. Pour the strained gravy over the fish and bake until done.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Anchovy + fishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main flesh and bones that give the pie its body and rich flavour in the stock.
Butter
Enriches the forcemeat, adding fat for a moist, tender texture.
Anchovy
Adds a savoury, salty depth to the forcemeat.
Breadcrumbs
Help bind and absorb liquid, giving the forcemeat body.

The step that matters

Straining the boiled stock. Boiling the bones and skins long enough extracts gelatin and flavour, but the liquid must be strained clean of bone fragments so the gravy is smooth and sets properly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, pepper, butter, anchovy, parsley, lemon, fish):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, pepper, butter, anchovy, parsley, lemon, fish. 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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