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Fried Eels
Cut a large eel into thick slices, after skinning and cleaning; put the pieces into a basin with vinegar, the peel from two or three lemons, and a little each of salt and pepper, and let them soak for a day or so; take them out, drain, dip into batter, plunge into a fryingpan of boiling fat and fry. When done, drain, place on a napkin on a dish, and serve with a sauceboatful of reduced stock mixed with a little lemon juice and a pounded, boned anchovy.
A straightforward escabeche-style treatment: acid marinade, batter, deep fry, sharp anchovy sauce. Two details in the original need translating for a modern kitchen, and one needs correcting outright.
- Marinate cold, not on the counter"soak for a day or so" was written for a cool larder. Marinate the cut eel covered in the refrigerator; a day is ample, and a much longer soak in vinegar may leave the surface dry.
- Buying and cleaningAsk the fishmonger to kill, skin, gut and section the eel; the skin is tough and the fish is difficult to hold. A large eel will serve several people, though weights vary widely. Read "thick slices" as roughly 1½ to 2 inch crosswise sections, bone in.
- Eel bloodRaw eel serum contains a protein toxin, which is why eel is never eaten raw. It is destroyed by heat, so a properly fried piece is entirely safe; just wash hands, board and knife after handling, and keep the blood away from cuts and eyes.
- Lemon peelUse peel pared thin, with no white pith, from unwaxed lemons. Oscar's marinade is essentially vinegar plus zest oils; two lemons' worth is enough for a single eel.
- Frying fat"boiling fat" means fat at frying heat, roughly 350-375F, not liquid at a boil. Dry the drained pieces thoroughly before battering or the wet vinegar surface will make the coating slide off. Fry in batches so the temperature holds, allowing several minutes a batch and making sure the thick bone-in sections are cooked through.
- The batterNone is specified. A plain flour-and-water or beer batter, slack enough to coat but not cling thickly, is what suits the dish; eel is oily and does not want a heavy jacket.
- The sauce"reduced stock" means a fish or veal stock boiled down until it coats a spoon, a demi-glace in miniature. Whisk the pounded anchovy in off the heat; the recipe gives no order for the lemon juice, so add it to taste at the end.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin on the platter was a common way of serving fried dishes: it absorbs fat and keeps the crust from steaming. A rack over a warm plate does the same job.
Eel was cheap, abundant and unglamorous in nineteenth-century America — the tidal rivers of the Northeast were full of it, and it appeared regularly on hotel menus. Oscar Tschirky's kitchen at the Waldorf nevertheless treated it in the French manner: a long soak in vinegar and lemon peel to firm and season the oily flesh, then batter and fat, then a pungent anchovy-and-stock sauce to cut the richness. The anchovy is a survival of an older English and French habit of using salted fish as a seasoning wherever a modern cook would reach for anchovy paste or Worcestershire. American eel has since gone the other way entirely: overfishing and demand from the Japanese market have made it scarce and expensive, and a dish once served because it was thrifty is now a specialty order.