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EELS, STUFFED (a la Hollandaise)
Take a fine eel, skin and clean it, and divide it into two pieces. Cut down the front and carefully remove the backbone. Fill the hollow space with a firm stuffing made with whiting, mixed with chopped truffles or mushrooms. Put the pieces of eel in form again with bands of fat pork or bacon, and tie with string. Place them in a saucepan on a foundation of vegetables and herbs. Close the saucepan and let them cook a little, then moisten with some fish stock and white wine. Cook for twenty or thirty minutes. Now drain the pieces of eel, arrange them on a dish, and garnish with small potatoes. Send to table with a sauce Hollandaise (see HOLLANDAISE SAUCE) served separately. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A late-Victorian braised eel, boned and stuffed with fish forcemeat. The technique is sound; the sourcing and a few of the terms need translating.
- Buying and boningAsk the fishmonger to skin, gut and bone the eel, and to cut it into two lengths. Fresh eel is stiff and slippery to bone at home, and European eel is a critically endangered species subject to trade restriction. Some suppliers offer farmed eel or the Japanese and American species instead, though farmed European eel is still raised from wild-caught young. Check what you are being sold.
- "A firm stuffing made with whiting"A fish forcemeat. One workable modern reading is raw whiting fillet pounded or blitzed with egg white and a little cream until it holds, seasoned, then folded through with the chopped truffle or mushroom; a period cook might equally have bound it with a breadcrumb panada and egg. Either way it must be firm enough to stay put during braising; test a teaspoonful in simmering water before filling the eel.
- Bands of fat pork or baconThin sheets of back fat or unsmoked streaky bacon, wrapped round the reassembled fish and tied at intervals with butcher's string. They hold the shape and baste the lean flesh. Smoked bacon will dominate the Hollandaise, so choose unsmoked if you can.
- "Let them cook a little"This is the initial sweat on the bed of vegetables and herbs — a covered pan over low heat for five minutes or so, no colour, just to draw out the aromatics before the liquid goes in. Cassell's assumes the cook knows this stage as the start of any braise.
- The braising liquidFish stock and dry white wine; the recipe gives no proportions, so use more stock than wine and pour enough to moisten rather than cover. Keep it at a bare simmer with the lid on; a hard boil will split the forcemeat out of the cavity.
- TimingTwenty to thirty minutes is generous for a modern farmed eel of moderate size. Start checking at fifteen: the flesh should be opaque and the stuffing set to 145F at the centre. Eel is fatty and forgiving, but the whiting mousse dries out if pushed.
- Small potatoesBoiled or steamed new potatoes, buttered. Turning them into even ovals is one way to dress them for the look, but the recipe asks only for small potatoes.
- The HollandaiseServe it separately, as directed, and keep it barely warm rather than hot; too much heat will split it. If you want to use the braising liquid, reduce it hard and whisk a spoonful into the finished sauce.
- Yield and costOne fine eel of two to three pounds serves four as a main course. The "probable cost, 2s. 6d." is a period price note, not an ingredient; Cassell's gave one for almost every entry so a household could budget a menu.
Eel was cheap, abundant and unfashionable in Britain for most of the nineteenth century he London pie shops — which is precisely why a dictionary of cookery took trouble to dress it up. The à la Hollandaise here refers only to the sauce served alongside; French practice had long treated boning and stuffing a whole fish as a demonstration piece, and the addition of truffles and a whiting forcemeat lifts a workaday river fish into something a dinner-party table could accept. Cassell's cookery dictionaries, reprinted for decades, were written for the middle-class household with a cook rather than for the professional kitchen, and the compression of this entry — "let them cook a little", no oven, no quantities — shows how much technique such a cook was assumed to carry in her head. The truffle is the tell that this is a company dish; the fat pork bands are the tell that it is still a thrifty one.