Eel Pie
INGREDIENTS for small pie.-1 lb. of eels, a little chopped parsley, 1 shalot, pepper and salt to taste, the juice of 1/2 lemon, a small quantity of forcemeat, pint of Béchamel; puff paste. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 9d.
Skin and wash the eels, cut them in pieces 2 inches long, and line the bottom of the pie-dish with forcemeat. Put in the eels, and sprinkle them with the parsley, shalots, nutmeg, seasoning and lemonjuice, and cover with puff-paste. Bake for 1 hour, or rather more; make the Béchamel hot, and pour it into the pie.
TIME. Rather more than 1 hour.
SEASONABLE from August to March.
Eel Soup. INGREDIENTS for soup for 10 persons.-3 lbs. of eels, 1 onion, 2 oz. of butter, 3 blades of mace, 1 bunch of sweet herbs, 1/4 oz. of peppercorns, salt to taste, 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, 1/4 pint of cream, 2 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 38.
Wash the eels, cut them into thin slices, and put them into the stewpan with the butter; let them simmer for a few minutes, EELS, BOILED. then pour the water to them, and add the onion, cut in thin slices, the herbs, mace and seasoning. Simmer till the eels are tender, but do not break the fish. Take them out carefully, mix the flour smoothly to a batter with the cream, bring it to a boil, pour over the eels, and serve.
TIME.-1 hour, or rather more.
SEASONABLE from June to March.
Note. This soup may be flavoured differently by omitting the cream, and adding a little ketchup or Harvey's sauce.
A Victorian raised-crust fish pie in which the sauce goes in after baking, not before. Two details in the printed text need settling before you start: the quantity of Béchamel and the oven heat, neither of which is fully stated.
- The hinge: sauce goes in lastThe eels bake under the paste with only their seasoning and lemon juice, and the hot Bechamel is poured in at the end. The text does not say how; cut a vent in the lid before baking and widen it to pour through when the pie comes out. The recipe is explicit that the sauce should be hot when it goes in.
- Ambiguous sauce quantityThe ingredient list reads "pint of Bechamel" with the fraction lost. For 1 lb of eel in a small dish, a half pint (10 fl oz) is the plausible reading; a full pint will flood it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book does not use them. As a modern equivalent, puff paste of this kind is generally started hot, around 425F, and dropped to about 350F for the remainder of the hour so the fish cooks through without the crust burning. That is a suggestion, not something the text supplies.
- Forcemeat"A small quantity of forcemeat" means a seasoned bread-and-suet or veal stuffing pressed over the base of the dish. A fine-textured sausagemeat, or breadcrumbs bound with butter, egg and herbs, does the same job.
- NutmegNutmeg appears in the method but not in the ingredient list. No quantity is given; a few gratings.
- Preparing the eelAsk the fishmonger to skin and gut it; the skin is tough and the flesh very slippery to handle. Eel blood contains a protein toxic when raw, destroyed entirely by cooking, so avoid tasting raw flesh or getting blood in a cut, and cook the pie through.
- SourcingThe European eel is critically endangered and its trade is restricted; eel on sale is often farmed, and may come ready-cooked. If it is already cooked, it needs correspondingly less time in the oven.
- "Shalot""Shalot" -- One shallot, chopped fine.
- Yield1 lb of eel makes a genuinely small pie — two generous portions, three at a stretch as part of a larger meal.
Eel was cheap London protein well into the twentieth century: the Thames and its tidal creeks yielded them in quantity, and eel-pie shops were a fixture of the poorer streets in Mrs Beeton's own day - Mayhew describes them in the 1850s. The "seasonable from August to March" note fits the autumn run of silver eels heading downriver to spawn, when they are fattest. What separates the parlour version from the shop version is the sauce and the puff paste: the street pie was a plain crust served with a green parsley liquor, traditionally regarded as the ancestor of the liquor still sold in the pie-and-mash shops of the East End.