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Conger Eel, Boiled
Take a piece about twelve inches long from the thick part of a fine conger, tie it round with string, and put it into a stewpan with sufficient boiling water to cover it, add two tea-spoonfuls of salt, one of pepper, a breakfast-cupful of vinegar, a bunch of savoury herbs, and about two ounces of butter or dripping. Let it boil, then draw it to the side of the fire, and let it simmer gently for half an hour. Drain, and serve on a hot napkin. Send melted butter to table with it. Time, forty minutes. Probable cost, 3d. per pound. Sufficient for six persons.
A plain court-bouillon poach of a firm, meaty fish that has largely dropped out of British fishmongers' cases. The instructions are sound; most of the work for a modern cook is in sourcing and in reading the Victorian shorthand.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: boil, then draw aside -- The recipe brings the pan to a boil to set the outside, then draws it to the side of the fire to simmer gently. Take the second half literally: once it is drawn aside, keep the water barely shivering rather than at a rolling boil, or the flesh toughens and thick steaks break up at the flakes.
- Which part of the fish"The thick part" means the body forward of the vent, nearest the head. The tail half carries far more fine bone and is generally reckoned better suited to soup or stock. Ask for a centre-cut section, skin on, and expect a stout central bone rather than a fine pin-bone structure.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup in this period runs to roughly half an Imperial pint — about 8 to 10 fl oz, or a generous cup. That is a lot of vinegar, but it is doing the same job as a court-bouillon: firming the flesh and cutting the oiliness of the fish.
- DrippingBeef or pork dripping, saved from the roasting tin. Butter is the alternative given and is the easier choice; the fat here mostly enriches the poaching liquid rather than the fish.
- Melted butterIn a Victorian English cookbook "melted butter" is a sauce, not a bowl of liquid butter — a flour-and-butter roux let down with water or milk, seasoned, about the consistency of thin cream. Parsley or caper sauce would be usual alongside a boiled fish of this kind.
- TimingHalf an hour at a simmer suits a thick twelve-inch section; the forty minutes quoted includes bringing the pan up. Thinner cuts need proportionally less. The fish is done when the flesh releases cleanly from the central bone.
- Tie it firmlyThe string is not decorative. Conger flesh loosens as it cooks and a large section will collapse in the pan without it. Two or three turns of kitchen twine along the length, and lift it out with a slotted spatula rather than tongs.
- The hot napkinA folded linen cloth on the platter, to absorb the water that keeps seeping from a boiled fish. A warmed dish and a fresh tea towel do the same job today.
- YieldSix is realistic for a twelve-inch centre cut, which will weigh in the region of three to four pounds bone-in. The threepence per pound tells you what conger was in this period: among the cheapest fish on the slab.
Conger has long been eaten around the Channel and the western approaches, and it was long a mainstay of the Cornish and Channel Island fisheries, much of the catch salted and dried for export to Spain and Portugal rather than eaten at home. Victorian household books earned it a place in their pages because it was cheap protein, and they took seriously their duty to show a cook what to do with the inexpensive end of the market. The firm, faintly gelatinous flesh takes well to poaching in an acidulated liquid, and the same fish underpins the conger soups and stews still made in Guernsey and Jersey. Its later disappearance from British kitchens is often said to owe less to the fish than to fashion, as the trade consolidated around cod, haddock and plaice.