Fried Eels
Cut skinned eels into four-inch lengths, and season with salt and pepper. Then roll them in salted corn meal or flour, and fry.
Three sentences of instruction that assume a fishmonger has done the hard part and that you already know how deep the fat should be. The gaps worth filling are the fish itself, the fat, and how to tell when it is done.
- Buy it skinned and cutThe recipe begins after the unpleasant work. Eel skin is tough and slippery and traditionally nailed to a board to be peeled; ask the fishmonger to skin and gut the eel and cut it into lengths. Eel is sometimes sold live at Asian and Italian markets, where it may be labeled unagi or anguilla.
- Four-inch lengthsRoughly the size of a short cutlet. Eel is cut across the bone, so each piece keeps a section of backbone that lifts out cleanly once cooked. Cut thicker sections nearer the head, thinner at the tail, and expect the tail pieces to cook fastest.
- Eel bloodRaw eel serum contains a protein toxin that irritates the mouth and eyes, which is why eel is never eaten raw. Frying destroys it completely, so this recipe is sound as written; simply wash your hands and rinse the board before doing anything else with it.
- Corn meal or flourCorn meal here means plain yellow cornmeal, not a self-rising mix. Fine or medium grind clings best; coarse stone-ground gives a rougher crust that tends to shed in the pan.
- Fry means shallow-fryIn a period fish chapter this normally means a skillet with shallow fat, roughly a quarter inch, rather than a deep fryer, though the recipe does not say. In a modern kitchen, get the fat to 350-360F, lay the pieces in without crowding, and turn once. Eel is a fatty fish and renders some of its own fat as it cooks.
- DonenessSix to eight minutes total for average pieces, longer for thick shoulder cuts. The flesh should be opaque and pull away from the bone easily; undercooked eel is unpleasantly rubbery, and unlike lean white fish it tolerates a few extra minutes without drying out.
- To serveFigure a pound of cleaned eel for two people. Lemon and a plain parsley or tartare sauce were common accompaniments for fried fish of the period, and the richness wants something sharp rather than creamy.
- Sourcing noteAmerican eel populations have declined sharply and glass-eel fisheries are tightly regulated, with harvest permitted in only a couple of states. Buy from a fishmonger who can tell you the source; much of the farmed eel sold in the U.S. is Japanese eel raised in East Asia.
Eel was ordinary food in nineteenth-century America, caught in tidal rivers and creeks from Maine to the Chesapeake, speared through ice in winter and sold cheap by the string. That is why a general household manual like the Butterick book can dispose of it in three lines: the reader knew what an eel was and had probably watched one skinned. The taste for it in the United States is often traced to Dutch and later Italian immigrant cooking, and the Christmas Eve eel of southern Italy is the version that survives most visibly today. What has changed is not the recipe but the supply. Eels have not yet been bred at commercial scale "only in the laboratory, not in production " so all farmed eel begins as wild-caught juveniles, and the collapse of the American and European eel runs over the twentieth century turned a poor man's fish into an expensive specialty item.