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Conger Eel Soup
Put a bunch of savoury herbs into a saucepan, with a large carrot sliced, two large onions sliced, and two bay-leaves. Fry them to a light brown, then add four quarts of water. Let it boil, skim it well, season it with one ounce of salt, and half an ounce of pepper, and put into it five pounds of the head and tail part of a conger eel. Simmer gently and continuously for two hours, strain the soup, and put with it a pint of green peas. A few minutes before it is served, put in a pint of new milk. Time, three hours. Probable cost of conger, 3d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for five pints of soup.
A plain fish broth of the sort built on a cheap, bony, gelatinous cut. Most of what needs translating here is the seasoning, which is very heavy by modern measure, and the finish, which will curdle if you let it.
- The milk is the hingeA pint of milk goes in only a few minutes before serving, off a bare simmer. If the pot returns to a boil after the milk, the soup will curdle and the surface will go grainy; hold it below 180F.
- Halve the pepper, at leastHalf an ounce of pepper is roughly two level tablespoons of ground black pepper for five pints of soup, which reads as fiery rather than seasoned to most palates. An ounce of salt in four quarts (about one and a half to two tablespoons) is closer to reasonable, but season at the end instead and taste: four quarts of water finishes as five pints of soup only after a pint of milk and a pint of peas are added, so the stock itself concentrates by more than half.
- Conger eelConger is rarely sold in Britain or the US now and almost never at a fishmonger's counter outside coastal ports. The head and tail sections were the cheap, gelatinous, heavily boned parts, chosen because they set the broth; any large firm-fleshed fish frame with plenty of head and collar gives a comparable body.
- "A bunch of savoury herbs"This is a bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme, and often marjoram or savory, tied with string so it lifts out whole. Tie it, since the soup is strained anyway and loose leaves clog the sieve.
- Frying the vegetablesThe carrot, onions and herbs are browned in a little fat before the water goes in. Keep it to a light gold; scorched onion turns the finished broth bitter and grey.
- Two hours is for the bones, not the fleshThe flesh will be spent long before the two hours are up, but the extended simmer is what extracts gelatin from a bony cut. Skim carefully in the first ten minutes after boiling, then keep it at a lazy simmer so the broth stays clear.
- The peasA pint of shelled green peas goes into the strained soup. Fresh peas want 5 to 8 minutes; frozen peas want 2 to 3, added just before the milk.
- Yield and costFive pints, which is a good deal more than six to eight first-course servings; count on roughly ten to twelve small bowls. The "3d. to 6d. per pound" is Victorian pence and simply marks conger as one of the cheapest fish on the slab.
Conger was long a cheap fish in Britain: huge, powerful, full of fine bones, and sold for a few pence a pound when better fish fetched shillings. Conger soup is most strongly associated with the Channel Islands, where a version thickened with milk and greens is generally described as a Guernsey speciality, and with the Cornish and Breton coasts where the eels were caught in quantity and often dried for export. Cassell's, a household dictionary aimed at middle-class kitchens working to a budget, includes it alongside other cheap cuts and cheap fish: the cut costs little, and long simmering extracts gelatin that gives the broth body.