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Conger Eel, Fried
Cleanse the fish thoroughly. Cut it into thick slices, and brush each slice over with beaten egg, then strew over them finely-grated breadcrumbs. Fry them in plenty of hot lard or dripping till they are brightly browned on both sides, and the flesh leaves the bone easily. When sufficiently cooked, lay them on blotting-paper to take off the fat; put them on a hot dish, squeeze the juice of a lemon over them, and serve with shrimp, oyster, tomato, or anchovy sauce. Time to fry, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 3d. per pound. Sufficient, two pounds for four or five persons. CON
A straightforward egg-and-crumb fry, but conger is not the fish most cooks know, and the twenty-minute frying time belongs to a much thicker cut than a modern fillet.
- The fish itselfConger is a large, firm-fleshed sea eel, sold whole or in steaks at some fishmongers and rare in supermarkets. Ask for cuts from the forward half of the body: the tail end is a mass of fine bones and is best kept for stock.
- Cleansing means skinning tooConger skin is thick, tough and slimy; the recipe says only to 'cleanse the fish thoroughly', so the skinning was presumably left to the fishmonger. Have the fish skinned and cut into steaks about 1 to 1.5 inches thick, and rinse away the dark blood along the backbone.
- Twenty minutes is for thick steaksDeep slices of eel on the bone can genuinely take that long over moderate heat, but the crumbs will burn before the centre cooks if the fat is too hot. The recipe gives no temperature: keep the fat at a moderate frying heat and turn once. Thinner steaks will be done well before twenty minutes.
- The doneness test"The flesh leaves the bone easily" is the reliable signal here, better than colour, since crumbs brown well before conger's dense flesh gives up. Test at the backbone with a knife tip.
- Lard or drippingEither works; beef dripping is the stronger flavour. Use enough to come halfway up the slices in a heavy pan.
- Blotting-paperKitchen paper on a rack. Draining on a rack rather than flat keeps the underside crust from steaming soft.
- The saucesThe recipe offers shrimp, oyster, tomato or anchovy, and the choice does much to set the character of the dish. Tomato and anchovy give the sharpest foil to a rich, oily fish; shrimp and oyster sauces are richer.
- Yield and costTwo pounds for four or five holds up, allowing for the bone. The "3d. per pound" marks conger as cheap fish in its day, which is much of why it appears here at all.
Conger eel was long a staple of the English and French Atlantic coasts, salted and dried in quantity in the Channel Islands and the West Country, where dried conger was an export commodity in the medieval period. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled, generally placed in the later nineteenth century, it had become an unfashionable fish, cheap and coarse-textured, valued more for its firmness in soups and stews than for delicacy at table, which explains the battery of assertive sauces offered here. The egg-and-breadcrumb treatment with lemon and a made sauce appears here as it does in other Victorian recipes for plain, plentiful fish, and the entry's careful note of cost per pound is characteristic of a book written for households counting shillings.