Eel Soup
Clean and cut 2 pounds of eels into inch-lengths. Put some dripping in a saucepan and, when hissing hot, fry a sliced onion in it. After rubbing the pieces of eels dry, place in the saucepan and fry on both sides to a light brown. Turn all in a covered saucepan, pour in 3 pints of water, and cook slowly for an hour. Season with a pinch of mace and a larger pinch of cayenne, and 1 tablespoonful of minced parsley. Salt to taste. Stir in 2 tablespoonfuls of butter cooked to a roux with 1 of flour. Simmer three minutes, add the juice of a lemon, and serve.
A frugal fish soup built on the same logic as a chowder: fry the aromatics in fat, brown the fish, add liquid, thicken at the end. The main work is in the fish itself.
- Buying and cleaning the eelAsk the fishmonger to kill, skin and gut it; eel skin is tough and the flesh is slippery to handle. The recipe's two pounds is the weight bought, before cleaning, and may be one eel or several. European eel is CITES-listed and restricted in many markets, so what you find will usually be American eel, farmed Japanese eel, or frozen imported fillet.
- DrippingBeef or bacon dripping, saved from roasting. Any neutral fat or clarified butter works; use about 2 tablespoons, enough to film the pan.
- The hour of slow cookingEel is fatty and gelatinous and genuinely benefits from long, gentle cooking, unlike lean white fish. Keep it at a bare simmer so the rounds do not fall apart, and expect the broth to set to a light jelly if cooled.
- Deal with the bones before servingEel has a central backbone and fine lateral bones that loosen but do not dissolve. Lift the pieces out after the hour, pull the flesh from the bone, and return it to the pot before thickening; otherwise every spoonful is a hazard.
- The roux ratioTwo tablespoons butter to one of flour is deliberately butter-heavy, so it enriches more than it thickens. Cook it a minute or two without colouring, then whisk in a ladle of the hot broth before stirring it back into the pot to avoid lumps.
- Mace and cayenneMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sharp than nutmeg; ground mace from a jar is fine, about 1/8 teaspoon. The cayenne is meant to be noticeable rather than hot -- a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- Lemon last, off the heatLemon last -- The juice goes in after the simmering is finished, as the recipe directs; taking the pan off the heat first is a reasonable precaution, though the original does not say so.
- YieldThree pints of liquid plus the fish gives four generous bowls as a main course, six as a first course. Serve with bread; there is no potato or grain in it.
Eel was cheap protein in Britain and the northeastern United States well into the twentieth century, caught in tidal rivers and estuaries and sold live from tanks because the flesh spoils quickly. London had a long eel trade of its own, and stewed eels with their jellied liquor were a staple of the city's working-class cookshops. Wild eel populations have fallen sharply since this recipe was printed, which is why the fish that was once the cheapest thing at the market is now a specialty purchase.