Home › The Principles of Cookery › EELS, BOILED, FOR CONVALESCENTS (Invalid cookery)
EELS, BOILED, FOR CONVALESCENTS (Invalid cookery)
When the skin has been drawn off the eel, place it before a clear fire, or on a gridiron over a fire, to rid it of the oily matter. When it has parted with the fat (which will be in about ten minutes), scrape and wash it in warm water, and then put it into a saucepan with more hot water--about one quart--add a bunch of parsley, and a small quantity of salt, and simmer till done. Serve with a little of the broth in the dish, to which some minced parsley has been added. It should be simmered for twenty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. to 1s. per pound.
A plain poached eel from the invalid-cookery chapter, where the whole point is stripping the fish of its fat before it ever reaches the water. Two things need saying before anything else: the pre-grilling is not optional, and eel is no longer a fish you buy without asking questions.
- The hinge: render before you poachEel is one of the fattiest freshwater fish, and boiling it straight gives a greasy broth that was thought unfit for the sick. Ten minutes over a clear fire — a hot grill or broiler, or a dry ridged pan — melts out much of the subcutaneous oil, which is then scraped away. Skip it and the dish will taste of nothing but fat.
- SourcingThe European eel is critically endangered and trade in it is restricted; a fishmonger should be able to tell you the species and origin. American and Japanese eel are also under pressure. Farmed eel is grown from wild-caught juveniles, so "farmed" does not settle the question.
- Eel blood and slimeFresh eel blood contains a protein toxin that irritates skin and eyes; it is destroyed by heat. Handle the raw fish with care, keep it away from cuts and your face, and wash boards and hands. Have the fishmonger kill and skin it — the skinning described here is a skilled job.
- Twenty minutes is right, and it is a simmerBare tremble of the surface, around 180F, not a rolling boil. Thick middle-cut pieces of a large eel may want closer to 25 minutes; the flesh should slide from the backbone. Hard boiling breaks the flakes apart and clouds the broth.
- Quart of waterAn imperial quart, about 40 fl oz or 1.1 litres — enough to cover a pound or so of cut eel in a small saucepan. Use only as much as covers the fish, or the broth you serve alongside will be thin.
- Bunch of parsleyA handful of stalks, stems and all, tied if you like so it can be lifted out before serving. The minced parsley added at the end is separate, and is added to the broth in the dish rather than cooked in it.
- Yield and servingA pound of eel gives one or two invalid portions. Serve the pieces warm in a shallow dish with a few spoonfuls of the cooking liquid; brown bread and a little lemon are in keeping with the period. Eel is gelatinous enough that the broth may set to a light jelly when cold, and such jellies were themselves regarded as nourishment for the sick.
- Cost noteThe 6d. to 1s. per pound is late-Victorian retail price, printed as a marketing check for the housekeeper, and has no modern equivalent.
Invalid cookery had its own chapter in many large British cookery books of the nineteenth century, on the assumption that the household, not a hospital, would be feeding the sick for weeks at a time. Eel earned its place there because it was cheap, widely available, and reckoned strengthening, while the oiliness that made it suspect for delicate stomachs could be grilled away first. London had a long trade in eels, sold live from wells in Billingsgate and stewed in the pie-and-mash shops, and Cassell's readers would have thought of it as an everyday fish rather than a luxury. The rebuke of that abundance is the modern sourcing problem: eel populations across Europe collapsed in the later twentieth century, and a fish once sold by the pound at sixpence is now a regulated one.