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Lamprey Pie
Take one or two lampreys, clean them thoroughly, and cut them into pieces of convenient size. Line a pie-dish with puff pastry, then put in the lamprey, seasoned with salt, pepper, chopped parsley, and a little mace. Put a layer of sliced onions over the fish, then a layer of potatoes, then a layer of each in the same order. Pour over two glasses of good claret or half a pint of cider, and cover with puff paste. Bake for an hour.
A late-Victorian survival of a very old English dish, written for cooks who could still buy lamprey at market. The two things the original assumes you know are how to clean the fish and how hot the oven should be.
- Sourcing and legalitySea and river lamprey are protected or their capture licensed across much of Europe, and taking them from the wild is restricted in the UK and EU; regulated fisheries survive in parts of France, Spain and Portugal. Any lamprey you cook should come from a licensed supplier. In North America they are rarely sold for the table.
- Cleaning is not optionalLamprey carry a heavy coat of slime and their blood contains a serum that is irritant raw. They are scalded and scrubbed to strip the slime, bled, and the cartilaginous notochord (the "string" running the length of the body) pulled out before cutting. Thorough cooking deals with the serum; the slime is purely a matter of flavour and texture, and it is foul if left on.
- Oven heatNone is given. Puff pastry needs a hot start: 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and lift the lid, then down to 350F for the remaining 45 minutes so the potatoes and fish cook through.
- Two glasses of claretAs a period cookery measure a wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the recipe's own equivalence with half a pint of cider suggests a larger drinking glass is meant here; anything from a half to a full cup is defensible. The alternative, half a pint of cider, is 10 fl oz in British measure and 8 in American; either amount works. Cider here means the dry alcoholic drink, not sweet apple juice.
- The lined dishPuff pastry underneath a wet filling turns to paste. Either blind-bake the lining before filling, or line with shortcrust and keep the puff for the lid.
- Slice the potatoes thinAn hour at these temperatures will not cook thick raw potato slices sitting in liquid. Cut them no more than an eighth of an inch, or par-boil them for five minutes first.
- MaceThe original says only 'a little mace', which in this period would commonly mean blade mace. Ground mace is a reasonable stand-in at about a quarter teaspoon for a pie of this size; nutmeg is close but sweeter and coarser.
- YieldThe recipe gives neither dish size nor servings. Lamprey vary greatly in size, so judge the quantity by the dish you are filling.
- If you cannot get lampreyEel is the usual substitute and behaves the same way in the dish: oily, firm, and able to stand an hour in the oven. Any lean white fish will fall apart long before the pastry is done.
Lamprey are jawless, eel-shaped fish that were prized in medieval and early modern Europe partly because their rich, meaty flesh made them acceptable eating on fish days, when ordinary fish seemed penitential. English tradition ties them above all to Gloucester, which for centuries sent a lamprey pie to the reigning monarch at Christmas or coronation, a custom revived intermittently into the twentieth century; and Henry I is generally said to have died in 1135 of a surfeit of lampreys, a story that rests on twelfth-century chronicle accounts whose reliability is open to question. By the time Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the late nineteenth century the recipe reads more like a preserved curiosity than a working household dish. The layering of fish, onion and potato under a pastry lid, moistened with claret or cider, is the standard construction of a Victorian fish pie; only the lamprey marks it as antique.