Clean and skin the eels; let boil with salt, pepper and vinegar. Then cut into three-inch pieces. Heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; add 1 onion chopped; stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown; add 1 cup of water, salt, pepper, 1 bay-leaf, some parsley and thyme. Let boil well; add the eels and 1 glass of wine. Boil ten minutes longer; thicken the sauce with the yolks of 2 eggs well beaten and seasoned with lemon-juice. Serve with fried croutons.
A classic French matelote-style eel stew finished with an egg-yolk liaison. The whole dish hinges on that final step, so read it first.
- The hinge: never boil the yolksBeat the 2 yolks with the lemon juice, slacken them with a ladle of the hot sauce, then stir the mixture back into the pan off the heat. Return it to a bare shiver only until it coats a spoon; a boil will scramble the yolks and break the sauce.
- A glass of wineTurn-of-the-century cookbooks generally reckoned a wine glass at about 1/4 cup (2 fl oz), with some sources allowing up to 1/2 cup. The recipe does not say which wine; a dry white suits the poulette style.
- Buying eelFresh eel is a special-order item at most fishmongers; ask for it killed, gutted and skinned, which spares you the awkward part. Frozen skinned eel sections sold in Asian and Eastern European markets work well. Figure 2 to 2 1/2 lb for four servings.
- Eel bloodRaw eel serum contains a protein toxin that irritates skin, eyes and gut. Cooking destroys it completely, and this recipe cooks the eel twice, so the finished dish is fine. Simply do not taste anything raw and wash your hands and board after handling.
- The first boilTreat it as a short blanching in acidulated water, five to eight minutes for whole eel, not a long simmer. It firms the very fatty flesh and lets you cut clean three-inch pieces. Save a cup of that liquid to use in place of the plain water in the sauce.
- "Stir in flour until brown"A true poulette sauce is pale, so take the roux only to the colour of straw. Anything darker will fight the yolk-and-lemon finish.
- Ten minutes with the eelAlready blanched, the pieces need only enough time to take up the sauce. Check at six or seven minutes; eel goes from silky to woolly if pushed.
- CroutonsTriangles of white bread fried in butter or clarified butter, drained and set around the rim just before serving. They are structural here, since the sauce is loose.
- YieldServes four as a main course with boiled potatoes or rice, six as a first course.
A la poulette means a white sauce enriched and thickened with egg yolks and sharpened with lemon, a finish the French classical kitchen applies to mussels, tripe, sweetbreads, lambs' feet and, as here, eel. The origin of the name is uncertain and disputed: it has been explained by the sauce's resemblance to a pale chicken veloute, and also as the sauce used for chicken fricassee, rather than by any chicken in the dish. Eel was cheap, abundant and fatty, which made it a staple of river towns and of Catholic fast days, and cooks used vinegar in the blanching water and lemon in the liaison. Its appearance in a book that gives one dish per day from a different country is characteristic of the period: American home cooks in the early twentieth century were being introduced to "national" dishes as a form of armchair travel.