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EEL PIE (another way)
Take eels that weigh not less than half a pound when skinned. Put the heads, tails, and fins into a stewpan with some good veal broth, an onion, a blade of mace, a bit of lemon-peel, pepper, and salt. Cut the fish into pieces of three inches in length, and after soaking them in salt and water, rinse, drain, and lay them in a pie-dish with a seasoning of pepper and salt between each layer. When the broth is well flavoured, skim, and strain it into a basin to get cold, then pour it over the eels, and bake with an edging and cover of paste in a brisk oven. Warm a little gravy together with two table-spoonfuls of cream, and pour it through a paper funnel into the pie as soon as it comes from the oven. Time, one hour to bake. Probable cost, 6d. to 1s. per pound. Two pounds sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward cold-set fish pie: the trimmings make the stock, the stock is chilled so it sets into the pie rather than boiling out of it, and the cream goes in at the very end. Two details carry the dish — the broth must be cold when poured over the fish, and the cream must never see the oven.
- Buy the eel preparedAsk the fishmonger for skinned, gutted eel and keep the heads, tails and fins for the stock. Eel blood contains a protein toxin that is destroyed by heat, so cooked eel is entirely safe; do not taste the raw fish or the unheated soaking water.
- SourcingEuropean eel is now CITES-listed and stocks are managed, so buy only from a reputable supplier who can say where it came from; farmed eel is the usual option. Around 2 lb of skinned fish serves four to five, as the recipe says.
- "Brisk oven"Read that as a hot oven, roughly 400-425F. The pastry lid needs the heat to set and colour within the hour of baking specified.
- The cold brothCooling and skimming the stock before it goes into the dish is the hinge of the recipe. Warm liquid loosens the fat, steams the underside of the pastry, and boils up over the edge; cold, lightly gelatinous stock sets under the crust and holds the eel moist.
- Salt-and-water soakThis is to draw off the slime and firm the flesh, not to cure it. Fifteen to twenty minutes in cold salted water, then rinse and drain well, is enough.
- "Paste" and the paper funnelAn edging and cover of paste means a strip of pastry pressed round the rim of the dish and a lid laid on top — shortcrust or rough puff both work. The funnel is a cone of parchment pushed through the steam hole so the warmed gravy and cream run in without tearing the crust.
- Cream at the end onlyTwo tablespoons of cream stirred into a little warm gravy and poured in as the pie leaves the oven keeps it smooth. Baked in, it would separate.
- Mace and lemon-peelA blade of mace is a piece of the lace-like coating of the nutmeg; about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace substitutes. Use a pared strip of unwaxed lemon zest with no pith, and strain both out with the stock.
- DonenessEel is a fatty, firm fish and forgiving, but check after 45 minutes if the pieces are thin — the flesh should slip cleanly from the bone. "Probable cost, 6d. to 1s. per pound" is Victorian pricing and tells you only that eel was then cheap food.
Eel was one of London's great cheap proteins well into the twentieth century: the Thames and the tidal creeks yielded it in quantity, Dutch eel schuyts moored at Billingsgate to sell live fish from wells in their hulls, and eel pie shops fed the working city long before the modern chain restaurant. Eel Pie Island at Twickenham is generally said to take its name from the pies sold to river excursionists there. Cassell's, aimed at middle-class households running on a budget, gives eel pie more than one treatment because the fish was reliable, in season much of the year, and "6d. to 1s. per pound" — a fraction of the price of good beef. What distinguishes this version from the eel pies of the street shops is the veal broth: a proper gelatinous stock, seasoned with mace and lemon-peel in the eighteenth-century manner.