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Fried Eels
Clean eels, cut in two-inch pieces, and parboil eight minutes. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in corn meal, and sauté in pork fat.
A three-line recipe that assumes you have already dealt with the eel, which is where all the work is. The parboil is the step that makes the rest possible.
- Buying and killingEel must be very fresh, and is traditionally sold live or killed to order. Ask the fishmonger to kill, skin and gut it for you; a live eel is difficult to hold and continues moving well after it is dispatched.
- Skin, then parboilEel skin is thick and tough, and in this tradition it is usually pulled off before cooking rather than eaten, though eel is elsewhere cooked skin-on. The eight-minute parboil firms the flesh and loosens any remaining skin, and probably renders out some of the fat as well.
- Dry it thoroughlyCornmeal will not adhere to a wet, freshly parboiled piece. Drain the sections and pat them dry before seasoning and dredging, or the coating slides off in the fat.
- "Sauté" here means shallow-fry"Saute" here means pan-frying -- In this book saute covers cooking in fat in an open pan, not the modern near-dry toss. Use enough rendered fat to film the pan well and brown the pieces; the book gives no temperature.
- Pork fatThis most likely means fat tried out from salt pork, which brings salt and a cured flavour of its own. Lard is the closest substitute; if you do use salt pork fat, season a little more lightly than you would otherwise.
- DonenessAfter the parboil the pieces need only 3-4 minutes a side to brown and finish. Eel is done when the flesh pulls cleanly from the central bone; it is a rich, dense fish and dries out if pushed past that point.
- YieldFigure about 1/2 lb of dressed eel per person. Eel is oily enough that a smaller portion satisfies than you would expect, and it wants something sharp alongside -- lemon, vinegar, or a pickle.
- Sourcing todayAmerican eel stocks are much reduced and the fishery is regulated in most states; supply is seasonal and often goes to export. Farmed or imported eel, sold frozen or already cleaned, is the practical route.
Eels were once a staple rather than a curiosity along the New England coast and in its tidal rivers, caught in weirs and pots and speared through the ice in winter, and they turn up in colonial accounts as a cheap, abundant, fatty fish that kept a household fed. Their place in a Boston Cooking-School book is simply a reflection of that: Fannie Farmer's fish chapters cover what the Boston market actually sold, from cusk and haddock to smelts and eels, and the treatment here — parboil, dredge in corn meal, fry in pork fat — is the standard American method applied to almost any small fish of the period. The corn meal and salt-pork fat are the giveaway that this is a New England kitchen rather than a European one; the same fish in England would more likely have been jellied or stewed. Eel has since slipped out of the American repertoire, for reasons that are hard to pin down: scarcity and rising price are often cited, as are changing tastes and the universal availability of cheap fillets.