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Conger Eel, Roasted
Take a piece from the middle of a large conger eel, about twelve inches in length, clean it without opening. Make a forcemeat of bread-crumbs, shredded suet, parsley, lemon-thyme, pepper, and salt; bind with an egg and stuff the eel full, securing both ends with a buttered paper. Dredge it with flour, and baste frequently; throw a tumbler of cider into the dripping-pan, or, if cider is not to be had, a small quantity of vinegar. When half done, change the end by which it hangs, and continue to baste till quite done. It may be baked in an oven, but is more liable in that case to be dry and overdone. Time, about one hour. Probable cost, 3d. to 6d. per pound.
This is a spit recipe: the eel hangs vertically before an open fire, which is why the instruction to swap ends halfway matters and why the oven is dismissed as a second-best option. Everything below assumes you will use the oven anyway.
- Why the middle cutConger is dense with fine bones toward the tail and the head end is mostly frame. A 12-inch middle section of a large fish gives a thick, more or less boneless cylinder around the backbone, which is the only part worth roasting whole.
- "Clean it without opening"The gut is drawn through the vent and the gill opening so the body wall stays intact and can hold stuffing. Ask a fishmonger to do this; if the belly is slit, the forcemeat will need sewing or trussing in.
- Forcemeat quantitiesNone are given. For a 12-inch cut, work on roughly 4 oz fresh breadcrumbs, 2 oz shredded suet, a good handful of chopped parsley, a teaspoon of lemon thyme leaves, salt and pepper, bound with one egg. Beef suet is sold shredded in packets; butter is a workable substitute but the mixture will be looser.
- Lemon thymeA distinct cultivar, not thyme plus lemon zest, though a strip of zest with ordinary thyme gets close. It appears often in Victorian forcemeats and herb seasonings for fish, and stands up to the oiliness of conger better than parsley alone.
- A tumbler of ciderAbout 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Cider of the period would generally have been dry rather than sweetened, and the vinegar substitute suggests the point is acid, so use a dry cider; the pan liquid can be reduced to a sauce at the end rather than served as is.
- Oven temperature and timeThe book gives roughly an hour before a fire. In a 375F oven, a stuffed 12-inch cut of about 3 lb will take 45 to 60 minutes; the flesh should be opaque and come away from the backbone, around 145F at the centre. The warning about dryness is fair, so baste with the pan liquid and some dripping every 15 minutes and tent with foil if the skin darkens early.
- Buttered paperGreased parchment tied over each cut end to stop the stuffing escaping and the exposed flesh drying. Foil does the same job.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb middle cut with stuffing serves four to six. Conger is firm and rich; portions can be smaller than you would cut of white fish.
Conger was the cheap end of the fish trade, and the price note of 3d. to 6d. a pound confirms it: this was a fish for households buying by weight rather than by prestige. Large, muscular and full of small bones in the tail, it never had the standing of turbot or salmon in English kitchens, though it was long a staple of the Channel Islands and the Cornish and Breton coasts, where it was also dried and exported in quantity in earlier centuries. Cassell's has it roasted rather than baked, and its flesh is certainly firm enough to hang on a spit without collapsing; the stuffing of breadcrumbs, suet and herbs is a standard forcemeat of the period, applied here with cider in the dripping-pan to cut a fish that is decidedly oily. The passing remark that oven baking makes it dry is worth noting as a period document in itself: in the 1870s and 1880s the closed range was displacing the open fire in middle-class kitchens, and cookery writers were still making the case that the old method tasted better.