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Eel Pie

A pie made with eels, seasoned with pepper and salt, topped with a gravy thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. 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. Skin the eels, cut off the heads, tails, and fins, and clean the eels.

  2. Cut the eels into pieces.

  3. Place the eel pieces in a pie dish.

  4. Season the eel pieces with pepper and salt.

Make the gravy

  1. Boil the heads, tails, and fins in water with pepper and salt for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the gravy.

  3. Let the gravy cool.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the eel pieces.

  2. Cover the pie.

  3. Bake the pie for about 1 hour at 350°F (175°C).

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

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

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 during the long baking.
Flour
Thickens the cooled gravy so it clings to the eel pieces rather than running off.
Water
Forms the base of the gravy, extracting flavour from the boiled heads, tails, and fins.

The step that matters

Let the gravy cool before thickening it. Flour added to very hot liquid can clump instead of dissolving smoothly. Cooling the strained gravy first lets the flour disperse evenly and thicken into a smooth sauce.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper. 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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