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Conger Eel, Baked
Take a piece of conger eel weighing about two pounds, wash it thoroughly, and stuff it with a good forcemeat made with four parts of breadcrumbs to one of chopped parsley, a pinch of thyme, a little pepper, salt, and pounded mace, a small piece of butter, and the yolk of an egg. Bind the fish securely with string or tape, and put it into a deep dish with a little water. Dredge flour plentifully over it, place little lumps of butter on the top, and bake it in a good oven. Baste it often. When sufficiently cooked, take it out, thicken the gravy, and make it into any sauce you may like. Stewed tomatoes are very good served with it. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 3d. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain baked stuffed fish, written when conger was one of the cheapest things on the fishmonger's slab. The main work of translation is sourcing the fish and reading the vague oven direction.
- Buy from the thick endConger is riddled with fine, hair-like bones from mid-body to tail, and only the thick shoulder section behind the head is worth baking whole. Ask for a two-pound cut from the head end; the tail is for stock.
- If there is no congerConger is rarely sold outside coastal fish markets in Britain, France and Spain. A two-pound piece of monkfish tail, thick cod loin or a small ling gives the same firm, faintly sweet flesh that holds a stuffing.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperature; read it as a moderately hot oven, roughly 375-400F (190-200C). At that heat the floured, buttered surface browns while the interior comes up gently.
- Time and donenessAn hour is right for a dense two-pound piece with stuffing inside it, but go by temperature rather than the clock. The thickest part of the fish should read 145F (63C); the stuffing contains raw egg yolk and sits at the centre, so check it separately and give it longer if it lags behind.
- The forcemeat ratioThe original does not say whether four parts breadcrumbs to one of parsley is by weight or by volume; read by volume it is a great deal of parsley by modern taste, and a cup of dry crumbs to a quarter-cup of parsley works. Pounded mace is simply ground mace, and a pinch is enough to be noticed without turning the fish into pudding.
- Water in the dish"A little water" means no more than a shallow film in the bottom of the dish, to keep the drippings from catching and to give you something to baste with. Leave the dish uncovered or the flour crust will never colour.
- The sauceThickening the pan gravy with a teaspoon of flour worked into butter gives the traditional finish. The suggested stewed tomatoes are a good instinct, as conger is rich and gelatinous and wants acidity beside it.
- YieldFour to five as the original says, if the fish is one course among several; three generous plates on its own with potatoes.
Conger eel was long the fish of people who could not afford fish. At threepence a pound in the Victorian period it undercut almost anything else on the slab, and it was landed in quantity along the Cornish and Devon coasts and in the Channel Islands, where dried conger was for centuries an export commodity and conger soup a local dish still associated with Guernsey. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a vast household compendium of the late Victorian decades, gives it several treatments precisely because it was cheap, dense and available: the flesh is firm and gelatinous enough to bake in a lump and be carved like meat, which suited the period's fondness for stuffing and binding a fish with string as though it were a joint. The fine bones and coarse reputation kept conger off middle-class tables as the century turned; today much of the British catch is exported to southern Europe, where it is still valued for soups and stews.