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EELS (en Matelote)
Cut up five or six very small onions, and brown them with a little butter and flour in a stewpan. When of a light brown, add about half a pint of good broth and a wine-glassful of port wine, a few mushrooms, a bay-leaf, salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste. Have ready two pounds of eels, divided into lengths of three inches, simmer these in this gravy till tender, then remove them and place them high in the centre of a dish. Thicken the sauce with butter and flour, and serve it hot poured over the fish. Time to stew the eels, half an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. for this quantity. Sufficient for four or five persons.
The cookery here is straightforward — a brown roux, broth, port, a short stew — but the main ingredient is the problem. The European eel that Cassell's readers bought live from the fishmonger is now a critically endangered species under international trade control.
- The speciesAnguilla anguilla, the eel of British and French kitchens, has been assessed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN, with recruitment of glass eels down by well over 90 per cent from mid-twentieth-century levels. It is listed on CITES Appendix II, and the EU has maintained a zero export quota since 2010, so legitimate supply is tightly restricted and often opaque.
- Substitutes are not straightforwardAmerican eel (A. rostrata) is also assessed as Endangered, and the Japanese eel (A. japonica) as Endangered too; all farmed eel is grown from wild-caught juveniles, since the species has never been closed in captivity at commercial scale. Buying "farmed" does not remove the wild pressure.
- Handling, historicallyEel serum contains a protein toxin that is irritating to the eyes and to open cuts. It is destroyed by heat, so it was no concern in the finished matelote.
- If you want the sauceThe matelote base — browned onions, broth, port, mushrooms, bay, a butter-and-flour finish — belongs to a whole family of freshwater fish stews. Use a current recipe built around a species your fishmonger can account for rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the originalHalf a pint is 10 imperial fluid ounces, about 285 ml; a wine-glassful was conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz. "Probable cost, 2s. 6d." is the book's standard costing line -- half a crown for a quantity said to serve four or five.
- What "en matelote" meansA matelote is a sailor's or boatman's stew of freshwater fish in wine with onions and mushrooms, the name deriving from matelot, sailor. Red wine is the usual base in the Loire matelotes; the port here may be an English substitution.
Eels were one of the great cheap proteins of Britain and northern France for centuries: they ran up every tidal river, they survived transport alive in barrels of damp weed, and they were fat enough to make a satisfying dish without much else added. Medieval English rents and tithes were sometimes reckoned in "sticks" of eels, and the London eel-and-pie shops of the nineteenth century sold jellied and stewed eel by the bowl to people who could not afford much else. That everyday abundance is why Cassell's treats two pounds of eel as an unremarkable purchase at half a crown, and why the compilers felt free to dress it up in a wine sauce borrowed from French river cookery. The collapse came later and fast: the eel's extraordinary life cycle, spawning in the Sargasso Sea and drifting as larvae to European coasts, was only worked out in the 1920s by the Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt, and by then the barriers, drainage and fishing pressure that would reduce the glass-eel runs to a fraction of their former size were already in place.