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Eel Soup, Brown
Fry three pounds of eels, after rolling them in flour, bread-crumbs, or batter. Open, take out the bones, and set them aside. Fry chopped onions brown in butter, browning after-wards enough flour to thicken the soup without egg-yolks. Stir in gradually either water or stock; during the process season as for Eel Soup, White (see EEL SOUP, WHITE). Put in the eels, and, if you will, add at the same time a glass of white wine. After one boil up, serve, accompanied by bread dice toasted or fried. Similar soups can be made with other firm-fleshed, middle-sized fish, as small conger, soles, etc. By the same treatment cold remnants of fish, of various kinds, both boiled and fried, may be economised by appearing in novel and palatable forms of soup. They can be enriched by any lobster, oyster, or anchovy sauce that is left. If you happen to have a few shrimps, pick a handful; boil their shells; with a little of the liquor give a slight flavour of shrimps to the soup, at the same time that you throw in the meat of the shrimps. These soups bear a dust of cayenne and sugar, and should be accompanied by bread or rolls.
A brown roux fish soup built on fried eel, written in the compressed Victorian style that assumes you have already read the white version. A few things need spelling out before you start.
- The hinge: one boil onlyThe fried eel goes in at the end and the pot comes up to a boil once, then is served. Eel flesh is gelatinous and holds together well, but a long simmer after frying turns it woolly and clouds the soup with fat and crumb.
- The missing seasoning"Season as for Eel Soup, White" points to the companion entry, which you will have to look up: the seasoning is not given here. Expect a mild herb-and-spice base rather than anything hotter.
- Buying eelEuropean eel is critically endangered and under trade restriction; wild-caught eel is not a casual purchase. Farmed Japanese or American eel is sold live or dressed at Asian and Iberian fishmongers, and the recipe itself invites conger, sole or any firm white fish instead.
- Eel bloodRaw eel serum contains a toxin that irritates skin and eyes and is dangerous if it enters a cut. It is destroyed by heat, so cooked eel is entirely safe, but wash hands, board and knife after dressing the fish and keep the blood away from your eyes.
- Boning after fryingThe instruction is deliberate: fry the eel in sections, then split and lift the backbone out while warm. The flesh releases from the bone far more cleanly than it does raw, and the fried coating holds the pieces together.
- Browning the flourThis is a brown roux, thickened without the egg-yolk liaison used in the white soup. Cook the flour in the onion butter until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a hazelnut shell, then add the liquid gradually off the heat to avoid lumps.
- A glass of wineA "wineglassful" in Victorian books is usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, but the recipe says only "a glass", so the quantity is genuinely open; 2 to 4 fl oz of dry white is defensible. Add it with the stock.
- Bread diceCroutons, cut small and fried in butter or toasted dry. Serve them separately so they do not soften in the tureen.
- YieldThree pounds of whole eel gives roughly a pound and a half of picked flesh. The recipe fixes no quantity of liquid, so the finished volume, and the number it serves, is up to you.
Cassell's separates its eel soups into brown and white on the standard nineteenth-century principle: white soups are finished pale with cream or a liaison of egg yolks, brown soups take their colour and body from a fried roux and browned onion. Eel was the cheap fish of Victorian London, sold live from Thames-side and Billingsgate stalls and eaten as jellied eels, eel pie and eel soup in enormous quantity, which is why a dictionary of cookery aimed at middle-class households gives it several entries rather than treating it as a delicacy. The long second half of this entry is equally characteristic of the period's domestic economy: the book recommends the same brown roux base for turning yesterday's boiled or fried fish, and any leftover lobster, oyster or anchovy sauce, into something that could go back on the table without looking like a remnant.