Home › The Principles of Cookery › EELS, SPATCHCOCKED (another way)
EELS, SPATCHCOCKED (another way)
Take two pounds of eels; cut their heads off with a sharp knife, skin and clean the fish, and divide them into three-inch lengths; bone these, and sprinkle the inside of each with a mixture of chopped parsley, sweet herbs, pepper and salt. Put in a tiny piece of butter, and a squeeze of lemon-juice, close them, cover each piece with egg and bread-crumbs, and fry in boiling fat to a golden brown. Drain on blotting-paper, and serve on a hot napkin, garnished with fried parsley and cut lemon. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A straightforward crumbed-and-fried eel, and the boning is the whole job — everything after it is routine deep-frying.
- Get the fishmonger to do the workAsk for the eel killed, skinned, gutted and cut into 3-inch lengths, or filleted outright. Skinning a fresh eel is genuinely difficult without practice, and the flesh is easier to bone while very cold.
- "Spatchcocked" here means split, not grilledIn poultry the term means flattened for the gridiron; in the older eel usage (usually spelt "spitchcock") it refers to splitting the fish open before cooking, which could be either broiling or frying. In this recipe each boned section is stuffed, closed and fried in deep fat; nothing is grilled.
- Boning the sectionsSlit each 3-inch length along the back, run the knife along either side of the spine and lift it out with the fine rib bones attached. Work over a bowl — eel flesh is slippery and firm enough to take the handling.
- "Boiling fat"The phrase means fat hot enough to bubble fiercely when the food goes in, not fat at its actual boiling point; roughly 350-375F in modern terms. Eel is oily and needs a confident heat so the crumb sets quickly. Fry until golden brown, judging by colour rather than the clock.
- Sweet herbsPeriod shorthand for a mixture of mild aromatic herbs — thyme, marjoram and savory are usual candidates, sometimes with basil or sage — with the parsley counted separately here. A teaspoon of chopped mixed herbs to the 2 lb of fish is enough.
- Blotting-paper and the hot napkinUse paper towels for draining. The "hot napkin" is a folded linen cloth on a warmed platter, which absorbs the last of the fat; a wire rack over a warm plate does the same and keeps the crust crisp.
- Fried parsleyDry sprigs dropped into the same fat for about fifteen seconds, until they stop spitting and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley will erupt, so dry it thoroughly first.
- YieldTwo pounds of eel, boned, feeds four as a main course with the lemon and little else. The probable cost of 1s 6d is modest for a dish of this size in the later nineteenth century, when eel was common food in London.
- SourcingEuropean eel is critically endangered and its trade is restricted; if you buy eel, look for farmed stock and check what is legal where you live. Note also that raw eel blood is toxic and irritating to cuts and eyes — a reason to leave the killing and cleaning to the fishmonger. Thorough cooking destroys it.
Eel was one of the great cheap proteins of nineteenth-century Britain, hauled from the Thames and the Fens and shipped alive to London in wet-welled Dutch schuyts that moored at Billingsgate — the fish keeps for days out of water, which made it a reliable town food long before refrigeration. Cassell's gives eels a long run of recipes because the household it addressed needed variety in an ingredient it could always afford: stewed, collared, spitchcocked, fried, in pies. Older cookbooks often spell the word "spitchcock" and reserve it for eel alone, in the specific sense of splitting the fish open before cooking; its origin is uncertain. That the same book offers "another way" is a fair measure of how ordinary the dish was.