Home › The Principles of Cookery › EELS, FRIED (another way)
EELS, FRIED (another way)
Take one pound and a half of eels, cut off their heads, skin and clean the fish, and cut them into four-inch lengths. Dry them in a soft clean cloth. Mix together two ounces of flour, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and one tea-spoonful of salt; roll the pieces of eel in the mixture, and put them into a frying basket. Fry in boiling lard to a golden brown. Drain on blotting paper, and serve on a hot napkin, garnished with fried parsley. Probable cost, 1s. to 1s. 6d.
A plain deep-fried fish recipe that depends almost entirely on the fish being bone-dry before it meets the flour. Most of the work here is in the sourcing and the preparation, not the cooking.
- Sourcing the eelThe European eel (Anguilla anguilla) that Cassell's readers bought cheaply from the fishmonger is now assessed as critically endangered and its international trade is restricted under CITES. Where eel is sold at all, buy it from a supplier who can name the fishery; farmed Japanese or American eel and conger are the usual substitutes.
- Buy it cleanedSkinning and gutting a live or freshly killed eel is a job many cooks now hand to the fishmonger. Ask for it headed, skinned, gutted and cut into lengths; 1 1/2 lb of whole eel yields noticeably less on the plate once the head and skin are gone.
- Eel bloodRaw eel blood contains a protein toxin that irritates skin and eyes, which is one reason eel is never served raw. Frying destroys it completely, so this is only a caution about handling and rinsing down surfaces, not about eating the finished dish.
- Dry the fish properlyThis is the hinge. Eel is fatty and slippery, and any surface moisture turns the flour to paste and the crust to a soft grey skin. Pat it dry, then leave it uncovered on kitchen paper for ten minutes before dredging.
- "Boiling lard"Lard does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to fry hard, around 350-375F. Below that the eel absorbs fat and goes greasy. A neutral high-smoke-point oil works, though lard gives the drier crust the recipe expects.
- The frying basketA wire basket in a deep pan of fat. A modern deep fryer or a heavy saucepan with a spider works the same way. At 4-inch lengths, fry in two or three batches so the fat temperature does not collapse.
- Cooking timeNot stated in the original. Pieces this size need roughly 4-6 minutes at temperature, until the coating is a deep gold and the flesh at the bone is opaque. Eel is dense and takes longer than a flat white fish of the same weight.
- Blotting paper and hot napkinKitchen paper for draining, a folded cloth or plain warmed plate for serving. Do not cover the fish or the steam softens the crust.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into the same fat for about 20 seconds, until crisp and still green. Wet parsley spits violently, so dry it thoroughly first.
- Yield and the cost noteServes two as a main course or three or four as a first course. "1s. to 1s. 6d." is the late-Victorian cost of the ingredients, of the kind the book gives throughout its entries; it has no useful modern equivalent.
Eel was cheap urban food in nineteenth-century Britain, and London in particular ran on it: eel and pie shops, jellied eel stalls, and barges of live Dutch eels moored in the Thames to keep the stock alive until sale. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, gives eels several treatments -- stewed, spitchcocked, jellied, fried -- because the fish was abundant, fatty enough to fry well, and inexpensive, exactly the qualities the book's costings advertise. That abundance is the part that has not survived: European eel stocks collapsed over the twentieth century, and a fish once sold from barrows by the pound is now a restricted and closely managed catch. The recipe's technique, though, is standard fish frying of the period -- seasoned flour, a wire basket, hot lard, and fried parsley as the near-universal Victorian garnish for anything from the sea.