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Eels, Boiled
Soak three or four small eels in strong salt and water for an hour. Drain them, and put them into a stewpan, with just the quantity of water requisite to cover the fish. Add a bunch of parsley, and let the eels simmer about half an hour. Serve in a shallow dish, with melted butter sharpened with plenty of lemon-juice. Sufficient for four persons.
A plain poach of the sort Victorian cookbooks used as a baseline before going on to stewed, spitchcocked and collared eels. Two things need attention: what "melted butter" meant then, and the fact that half an hour is far longer than small eels want.
- Buy them cleanedThe recipe presumes the eels arrive killed, skinned and gutted, though plenty of Victorian books do give instructions for doing it at home. Order them dressed; the recipe itself gives no size and does not say to cut them up.
- SourcingEuropean eel is critically endangered and its trade is tightly restricted; most eel sold now is farmed Japanese or American eel, often already smoked or cooked. Check what your supplier actually has before planning the dish.
- Eel bloodRaw eel serum contains a protein toxin that irritates the mouth and eyes. Cooking destroys it completely, so a poached eel is entirely safe, but there is no place for tasting the raw fish or its liquor.
- Cut the timeHalf an hour turns small eel sections woolly. At a bare simmer, 2-3 inch pieces are done in 10-15 minutes, when the flesh parts from the central bone with no pink at it. Never let the water boil hard or the pieces break up.
- The salt soakAn hour in strong brine firms the flesh and helps shed the surface slime that makes eel unpleasant to handle. It also seasons the fish; note that the recipe adds no salt whatever to the poaching water.
- StewpanA straight-sided saucepan wide enough to hold the pieces in one layer. A shallow saute pan works better than a deep pot, since you want the minimum water to cover.
- "Melted butter"In Victorian English this is a sauce, not a puddle of butter: butter and flour cooked together and let down with liquid to a pouring consistency. Period proportions vary and are usually much butter-heavier than flour, so treat any exact ratio as a modern reconstruction. Use some of the poaching liquor for it, then sharpen with lemon juice off the heat.
- ServingFour portions as written, assuming the eel is a main course with potatoes. The parsley bunch is there to scent the water and should be lifted out; chop fresh parsley into the sauce if you want it on the plate.
Eel was cheap urban food in nineteenth-century Britain long before it became a delicacy, and London in particular ate enormous quantities of it: the Dutch eel-ships moored at Billingsgate supplied stewed-eel shops across the East End, and jellied eels grew out of the same trade. Cassell's, published for middle-class households in the 1870s and after, treats the fish matter-of-factly, under the entry title "Eels, Boiled". The pairing with a flour-thickened butter sauce cut with lemon is a common English answer to an oily fish of the period, the acid doing the work that a modern cook might give to vinegar, capers or a sharp green sauce. Eel populations have collapsed since, and a dish that once fed dockworkers is now an expensive and closely regulated one.