Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Fricassee of Eel
Fricassee of Eel
Skin and clean some eels and cut off their heads; chop them up into small pieces and put into a fryingpan with sufficient white wine and water in equal parts to cover; season with mace, pepper, nutmeg, cloves, sweet herbs, allspice and salt according to taste. Set the pan over a good fire and boil until the eels are quite tender, then put them on a dish. Pound in a mortar two anchovies and add them to the liquor with a little butter and yolks of eggs to thicken. Pour this over the fish, and serve.
A very old English-style fricassee that survived into the Waldorf's kitchen almost unchanged. The whole dish turns on the final liaison, which is where most cooks lose it.
- The hinge: the egg yolk liaisonOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must never return to a boil or it will scramble into threads. Take the pan off the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot cooking liquor, then stir the mixture back in and hold it below about 180F until it coats a spoon.
- "Fryingpan" here means a sauté panThe eel is simmered in liquid, not fried. Use a wide, straight-sided pan or shallow braiser that will hold the pieces in one layer under an inch or so of liquid.
- "A good fire" and cooking timeBring it up briskly, then drop to a bare simmer. Two-inch sections of eel are tender in roughly 15 to 20 minutes; pushed to a hard boil they shed their fat and the flesh goes woolly.
- The spice list needs a handSeven seasonings "according to taste" is a convention of older cookery writing rather than a measurement. For two pounds of eel, a blade of mace, three or four cloves, a good grating of nutmeg, six allspice berries and a small bundle of thyme and parsley is proportionate; cloves and allspice will bully everything else if doubled.
- Anchovies are the saltTwo mashed anchovy fillets carry a fair amount of sodium and glutamate. Salt the poaching liquid lightly and correct only after the anchovy and butter have gone in. A mortar still does this best, though the back of a knife on a board works.
- Skinning, and buyingEel skin is tough and slippery; fishmongers will skin and section it, which is worth asking for. Buy American or farmed eel from a reputable source — the European eel is listed under CITES and trade in it is restricted.
- On raw eelEel serum contains a protein toxin that is destroyed by heat, which is why eel is never served raw. Full simmering as written handles it; do not taste the raw fish or the unheated poaching liquid.
- Wine and yieldEqual parts dry white wine and water to cover means roughly a cup of each for two pounds of eel. That quantity serves three or four as a main course with bread or plain boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
Eel fricassee is an old dish in the English kitchen repertoire, and this version reads like it was copied forward through a century of cookbooks with barely a word changed — the anchovy-and-egg-yolk thickening, the shotgun spread of mace, cloves, nutmeg and allspice, and the phrase "according to taste" all belong to eighteenth-century practice rather than to 1896. Fricassee comes from the French fricasser, usually glossed as to fry or stew, though the word's own origin is uncertain and is often linked to frire plus casser; by the nineteenth century in English it meant almost any meat or fish stewed in a pale sauce finished with butter and yolks, as distinct from a brown stew. Eel earned its place because it was abundant, cheap and travelled alive to market, and it remained a familiar item on American tables into the early twentieth century before falling out of fashion. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and put his name to this collection, was gathering the practical repertoire of a large hotel kitchen; the survival of so plainly archaic a recipe among the book's grander French preparations is a reminder how much of that repertoire was inherited rather than invented.