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Matelote of Eels
Cut the eels in three or four inch lengths, or truss them into an oval or round shape, place in a stewpan with sliced carrot, onion, parsley, mushrooms, thyme, bay leaf, mace, two or three cloves, etc., season with claret wine and set the eels on the fire to stew. When done drain, trim, and glaze with some lobster coral in the glaze; pile the eels in a pyramidal group on a dish, with some good brown sauce made with the liquor in which the eels have been stewed; garnish round with alternate groups of button mushroons and crawfish tails and send to table
A late-Victorian restaurant dish written in kitchen shorthand: the original assumes you know what a glaze is, what brown sauce means, and that eel is sold live. The quantities are almost entirely unstated, so treat the list as a proportional court-bouillon rather than a formula.
- Quantities are not givenNothing here is measured. For 2 lb of eel, figure one carrot, one onion, a handful of parsley stems, 4 oz mushrooms, a sprig of thyme, one bay leaf, a blade of mace and three cloves, with enough wine and water to barely cover.
- ClaretIn British usage of this period this means dry red Bordeaux, not a sweet fortified wine. "Season with claret" is the whole braising liquid: roughly 2 cups wine to 1 cup water or fish stock for 2 lb of eel.
- Buying and cleaning the eelAsk the fishmonger to kill, skin and gut it; the skin is tough and the fish is difficult to hold. Eel blood contains a protein toxin that is destroyed by cooking, but keep raw blood away from cuts and eyes and wash the board well.
- "Truss them into an oval"Curl each cut length into a ring or coil and tie it with kitchen string so it holds shape while stewing. Skip it and the pieces still cook fine; they just will not stack into the pyramid the recipe wants.
- Stewpan and heatA wide, shallow pan with a lid. Bring the liquid to a bare simmer and hold it there. Eel is fatty and forgiving but boiling breaks the pieces apart; 20 to 30 minutes for three-inch sections, until the flesh comes cleanly from the bone.
- GlazeNot a sugar glaze. Strain the cooking liquid, reduce it hard until it coats a spoon, and brush it on. The lobster coral, the roe of a hen lobster, is stirred in for color; it is rarely sold on its own now, though it comes with any whole hen lobster. A spoonful of tomato paste or shrimp butter gives the same red without pretending to be the same thing.
- "Good brown sauce"Espagnole or a modern brown roux sauce, slackened with the strained eel liquor and reduced. If you are not keeping a brown sauce, whisk a beurre manié into the reduced braising liquid and finish with cold butter.
- GarnishButton mushrooms cooked separately in butter and lemon so they stay pale, and crawfish tails, cooked and peeled. Frozen crawfish tail meat is an acceptable stand-in; small shrimp will also serve.
- YieldTwo pounds of dressed eel with the sauce and garnish serves four as a main course, six as a first course.
Matelote comes from matelot, French for sailor, and the name is generally traced to the freshwater fish stews of the Loire and the Marne, made by boatmen with whatever came out of the river and whatever wine was at hand. Eel is the classic base because it is fatty enough to survive a long simmer in red wine and gelatinous enough to thicken the liquor by itself. By the time this book was printed, matelote had left the riverbank entirely: the trussed ovals, the coral-tinted glaze, the pyramid on the dish and the alternating garnish groups are the vocabulary of the professional hotel kitchen. It also records how ordinary eel once was in English and American markets, sold live from tanks and barrels, before European and American eel stocks declined, a collapse documented largely in the late twentieth century, and the fish became a specialty import.