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Conger Eel Pie
Remove the skin and bone from two pounds of the middle of a conger. Cut it into pieces one inch and a half square, strew salt, pepper, and pounded mace rather plentifully over each piece, and put a layer at the bottom of a deep pie-dish. Fill the dish with alternate layers of oysters and pieces of fish. Pour over it some strong gravy made of the bones of the fish, and the liquor of the oysters boiled in good stock, cover with a good crust, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, one hour and a quarter. Probable cost: conger, 3d. to 6d. per pound; oysters, 1s. per dozen. Sufficient, a pie made with two pounds of conger and a tin of oysters, for six persons.
A plain Victorian fish pie of the kind Cassell's printed by the hundred: cheap firm fish, oysters as a stretcher, a stock made from the trimmings, and a pastry lid. The parts that need attention are the fish itself, the oyster timing, and the bake.
- Conger and what to use insteadConger eel is still landed in Britain and France but rarely reaches retail counters; it is firm, meaty and full of fine bones towards the tail, which is why the recipe specifies the middle cut. Any firm white fish that holds its shape works in its place — monkfish, huss, ling, or thick cod loin — cut to the same inch-and-a-half pieces.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F / 180C. If you use puff pastry rather than a short crust, start at 400F / 200C for the first 15 minutes to set the lift, then drop back.
- The oysters are the problemOysters held at oven heat for an hour and a quarter shrink to rubber. Either accept them as a seasoning element rather than something to eat whole, or add them raw under the crust only for the last 10 minutes of baking. A modern approach is to build the pie with fish and gravy, bake it, and slip the oysters in through a vent near the end.
- An hour and a quarter is a crust time, not a fish timeTwo pounds of fish in a deep dish is cooked through in 30 to 40 minutes at 350F. The long bake is there to cook a raw pastry lid over a cold filling. Fill with warm gravy and the whole thing comes together faster and drier at the edges.
- "Strong gravy"Simmer the conger bones and skin in good stock for 20 to 25 minutes — long fish-bone stocks are generally held to go bitter — strain, add the oyster liquor, and reduce until it coats a spoon. It should be thick enough not to flood the pastry.
- Pounded maceMace is the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, milder and more floral. Ground mace from a jar is fine; about half a teaspoon across two pounds of fish matches "rather plentifully." Nutmeg substituted one-for-one will be noticeably heavier.
- A tin of oystersTinned oysters were available in the period, and the recipe assumes them; a rough modern equivalent is 8 to 12 shucked oysters with their liquor, or two small tins. Note that even in the original costing the oysters are the dearer element — a shilling a dozen against threepence to sixpence a pound of conger — and the gap has only widened since.
- Dish and yieldA deep pie-dish of at least 2 to 3 pints / 1.2 to 1.7 litres. The original says six servings, which is right if served with potatoes and a green vegetable.
Conger eel was for centuries a working fish of the English south-west, the Channel Islands and Brittany — large, coarse-fleshed, easy to catch off rocks and, once salted and dried, a significant export from Cornwall and Devon to Catholic Spain and France. By the time Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the 1870s it was firmly a cheap fish, priced here at threepence to sixpence a pound against a shilling a dozen for oysters, and the pie belongs to the long British tradition of pairing an inexpensive fish with shellfish for savour rather than luxury. Oysters played the same role in beefsteak pudding and steak-and-oyster pie: before the Thames and Kentish beds were fished out and prices climbed, they were a poor man's flavouring, not a garnish. The recipe is also a small record of how thoroughly tastes have shifted — conger now appears mainly in French and Spanish cooking, while the oyster it once shared a dish with has become the expensive half of the pair.