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Eel Patties
Skin and wash some middle-sized eels, and after having cut them into pieces of an inch long, soak in salt and water for an hour. When drained, put them into a stewpan with just enough hot water to cover them; add salt, pepper, a blade of mace, a little lemon-peel, and a sprig of parsley. When the fish will separate from the bone, which will be the case after eight or ten minutes' gentle stewing, divide each piece into two, and put them aside until the broth has stewed a little longer; then remove the lemon-peel, mace, etc. Thicken with butter and a little flour, flavour with lemon-juice or vinegar, and return the pieces of eel to the broth. Make patties as directed for mutton patties (see MUTTON PATTIES). Time, a quarter of an hour to bake the crust.
A Victorian potted-fish filling for small puff-paste cases, written on the assumption that the cook already knows the pastry method from the mutton patty entry. The eel is poached, flaked, and bound in its own thickened broth.
- Sourcing the eelThe European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is now critically endangered and CITES-listed, with commercial export from the EU prohibited. Farmed Japanese eel (unagi) or, where legal, American eel are the practical substitutes; ask the fishmonger what species is on the slab.
- Eel bloodRaw eel serum contains a protein toxin that irritates skin and eyes and is dangerous if swallowed in quantity. It is destroyed by heat, so the stewed fish here is entirely safe, but wash hands, board and knife after handling raw eel and keep the juices away from cuts.
- SkinningEel often reaches the customer already skinned and gutted. If it has not, the skin is tough enough that it is worth asking the fishmonger to do it rather than wrestling it at home.
- A blade of maceOne thin blade from the lacy aril of the nutmeg, roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, though the whole blade is preferable because it is lifted out again.
- The salt soakAn hour in salt and water is a light brine that firms the flesh and draws out blood. It also salts the fish, so hold back on further salt until the broth is thickened and tasted.
- Don't overcook the fishEight to ten minutes at a bare simmer is the whole of it. Eel is fatty and forgiving compared with white fish, but the flakes will still shred to mush if the pot is allowed to boil or the pieces sit in it while the broth reduces, which is exactly why the recipe tells you to lift them out.
- ThickeningWork equal weights of soft butter and flour to a paste, about 15 g of each per 300 ml of broth, and whisk it in in pieces over gentle heat. The sauce should coat a spoon; a thin filling will soak the pastry base.
- The crustThe mutton patty method means puff paste baked in small rounds or cases. The book gives no oven temperature here, only "a quarter of an hour to bake the crust"; bake until the pastry is risen and dry through.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities. They are meant to be eaten hot from the oven; the filling can be made a day ahead and reheated gently.
Eel was cheap, abundant and, being long-lived out of water, one of the few fish that could be carried alive into inland English towns before refrigeration — which is why it turns up so often in nineteenth-century cookery under every treatment from stewing and jellying to pies and patties. Cassell's places this in the general run of "made dishes": small hot patties of puff paste with a bound savoury filling, a standard item of the Victorian second course and supper table, where the same shell was filled indifferently with mutton, lobster, oyster or chicken. The instruction to look up mutton patties for the crust is characteristic of the dictionary format, which cross-references relentlessly to avoid printing the same pastry method forty times. London drew its eels from home waters and, in large quantity, from Dutch eel boats moored in the Thames; the collapse of the European eel population, and the protected status it now carries, is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century story that this recipe's author could not have imagined.