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Braised Eels (Royal Style)
Skin and wash an eel, and cut in 2-inch pieces; sprinkle with salt and allow them to stand an hour or two. Put into cold water for ten minutes; then dry, and put in a buttered saucepan, season with salt and pepper and a suspicion of nutmeg; over the whole put a little scraped parsley root, a few whole white peppers, and a few slices of lemon and shallots. Put the saucepan over a moderate fire, with hot ashes on the lid, and braise till the fish is done. Take out the pieces of eel and keep hot while you add to the saucepan a cupful of stock; boil a few minutes, then thicken with a white roux; take from the fire, and the slightly beaten yolks of 3 eggs. Let it come to a boil, and strain this into a saucepan with twice the quantity of German sauce; let it boil once; pour over the eel, and serve.
A nineteenth-century braise built on classic French method: the eel cooks in its own moisture with aromatics, and the pan liquor becomes the sauce. Two things need translating before you start — the ash-covered lid, and the egg liaison.
- The hinge: the yolksOnce the three yolks go in, the sauce must not boil. Bring it to no more than 180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon. The instruction to "let it come to a boil" is best read loosely; taken literally it scrambles the sauce.
- Hot ashes on the lidEmbers banked on a flat pot lid to give heat from above as well as below, the same principle as a lidded cast-iron pot with coals heaped on top. A heavy lidded pan in a 325F oven gives a similar effect, roughly 20-25 minutes for 2-inch pieces.
- "A moderate fire"On the stovetop, the lowest steady heat that keeps a bare tremble in the pan. Eel is fatty and forgiving but goes woolly if it is allowed to gallop.
- German sauceSauce allemande — a veal or chicken velouté enriched with egg yolks, lemon and sometimes mushroom liquor. The recipe assumes you already have it. Twice the quantity of the pan sauce means roughly two cups if you have used one cup of stock.
- White rouxEqual butter and flour cooked a minute or two without colouring. For a cup of stock, about a tablespoon of each gives a light nappe; the sauce thickens again with the yolks.
- Parsley rootHamburg parsley, the fat white taproot sold with parsley tops. Parsnip is the usual stand-in, used sparingly, as it is sweeter. Ordinary parsley stems will give the herbal note but not the body.
- The salting stepSalting for an hour then rinsing firms the flesh and helps lift the slick coating left after skinning. Do not skip the ten minutes in cold water, or the finished dish may come out over-salty.
- SourcingEuropean eel is under trade restriction and largely unavailable outside a few managed fisheries; American and Japanese eel are sold farmed and frozen, often already skinned. Eel blood contains a protein toxin that heat destroys, which is why eel is never served raw or rare — this recipe cooks it through as a matter of course.
- YieldA 2-3 lb eel serves four as a main course with plain boiled potatoes or rice to take the sauce.