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Eels, Spatchcocked
Large eels are best for this mode of cooking. When skinned and split, the backbones should be taken out carefully without tearing the fish, and they should be divided into pieces three or four inches in length. Have ready a seasoning of chopped parsley, a very little sage, a blade of mace pounded, pepper, and salt; let the pieces be well smeared with warmed butter and lemon-juice (or let them lie in it for two or three minutes), then strew the seasoning over, and dip each piece in egg and bread-crumbs. Fry in boiling fat, and serve in a round on the dish with sauce piquante in the middle. Some prefer plain melted butter with the juice of lemon. Time, twenty minutes to fry. Probable cost, 6d. to 1s. per pound.
A crumbed fried eel dish from the era when eels were cheap and sold live in every town market. The instructions are sound; the timing and the sourcing are what need attention.
- Fry for far less than twenty minutesEgg-and-crumbed pieces three or four inches long, in fat at 350-375F, are done in five to eight minutes and take colour before that. Held for twenty minutes, the coating burns and the flesh dries out.
- "Spatchcocked" here means split, not butterflied poultryThe term applied to eels (often written "spitchcocked") describes a fish or bird opened flat and cooked quickly. For eel it means splitting along the back, lifting out the spine, and cutting the flattened fish into lengths.
- Cook it throughRaw eel blood and serum contain a protein toxin that is destroyed by heat, which is why eel is never served rare or lightly cured. Fry until the flesh at the thickest point is opaque and flakes cleanly, around 145F internal.
- SourcingEuropean eel is listed under CITES and is heavily restricted; what reaches most fishmongers is farmed Japanese or American eel, often already skinned or sold as pre-cooked unagi. Buy it skinned and gutted unless you want to deal with a live eel, which is the reason old cookbooks give such careful boning instructions.
- A blade of maceOne blade is a piece of the lacy outer covering of a nutmeg, roughly equal to a quarter teaspoon of ground mace. The recipe wants it pounded, so ground mace substitutes directly.
- "A very little sage"Take that literally: a quarter teaspoon of chopped fresh sage for a pound of eel. Eel is rich and oily, and sage overwhelms it quickly.
- Sauce piquanteIn Victorian English usage this is a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallots and chopped gherkin or capers, not the Louisiana tomato sauce of the same name. The melted-butter-and-lemon alternative given at the end is the simpler and arguably better match.
- Yield and costThe pricing in old pence is of little practical use today; the range quoted is modest but not the cheapest fish on the slab. Reckon 6-8 oz of prepared eel per person as a main course, half that as a first course.
Eel was one of the cheapest and most abundant fish in Britain for centuries, taken from the Thames, the Fens and the Severn, kept alive in tanks and barrels until sold, and eaten stewed, jellied, pied or fried in London and across northern Europe. Cassell's gives it many entries precisely because it was ordinary: a fish that needed no ice to reach market alive and cost a fraction of what turbot or salmon did. The word spatchcock is often said to derive from an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish phrase for a bird dispatched and cooked in haste, though this remains a traditional explanation rather than a demonstrated one; by the Victorian period the word was used of any creature split flat for quick frying or grilling. What has changed is not the technique but the fish: the European eel's catastrophic decline since the 1970s turned a common food fish into a regulated one, and the jellied eel and pie-and-mash shops that were once numerous in East London have dwindled to a handful.