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Matelote of Eels
Skin two large eels, cut them into pieces, without opening the belly, thrust a knife blade into each piece, and twist it around to remove the inside. Wash them well; put into a saucepan with one breakfast cupful of stock and half a pint of claret, adding a clove of garlic, a whole pepper, a sliced onion, a bay leaf, thyme, cloves, parsley and a little salt, and boil gently until done. Take out the pieces of fish, strain the liquor and add a liquorglassful of brandy to it. Put a piece of butter into a saucepan, stir in one tablespoonful of flour to thicken, add it to the sauce and boil. Place croutons of fried bread in a circle on a dish; arrange the fish in the center, pour the sauce over and serve.
Matelote of Eels, Normandy Style Cut a pound and a half of eels into pieces, put them in a saucepan with a table-spoonful of butter and fry for two minutes, add a wineglassful of white wine, three tablespoonfuls of mushroom catsup, season well with salt, pepper and nutmeg and cook for ten minutes longer; add half a pint of veloute sauce, six mushrooms, twelve blanched oysters, six fish quenelles, and six small cooked crayfish tails and continue cooking for five minutes. Beat in the yolks of three eggs when ready to serve, then remove the pan from the fire and serve with a garnish of croutons of fried bread.
Stewed Eels, American Style Take three pounds of cleaned, skinned eels, having all the fat removed from the insides, cut them into pieces about two inches long, shake a little pepper and salt over and place in a jar with a quarter of a pound of butter. Chop an onion and scatter over the eels, and one dessertspoonful of chopped parsley. Cover the jar closely, stand it over the fire in a saucepan of cold water, allow it slowly to come to a boil and cook until tender. This will take about and hour and a half from the time the water boils. Serve in a deep dish. Stewed Eels, Bordelaise Style Skin and clean an eel, split it open and put in a stewpan with a slice of onion, two or three sprigs of parsley and a pinch of salt and pepper. Cover with Madeira wine and simmer until the eel is done. Take it out and press between two plates until cold, strain and reduce the liquor, add a little fish glaze and strain it through a conical strain into a bain-marie pan, cut the eel into fillets, put these with a little of the sauce into a stewpan over a moderate fire and heat the eel. Arrange them in a circle on a dish and garnish the center with glazed and blanched small onions. Mix a little anchovy butter and a pinch of cayenne with matelote sauce. Pour over the eels and serve. Stewed Eels, Poulette Style Cut some cleaned eel in two-inch pieces and stew them in a marinade or stock. Make a little white roux, and mix a little broth with it; add a few green onions, a bunch of parsley, one small white onion, five or six mushrooms, and a little glaze, seasoning with pepper and salt, and boil for twenty minutes, stirring continually. Take out the parsley and onions, and add a little finely chopped parsley and the juice of one lemon. Remove the eels, drain, dish, pour over the sauce, and serve.
Five eel preparations run together under one heading, in the compressed house style of a professional kitchen that assumed the reader already knew what a velouté was. The measures are late-Victorian and the shopping list has changed more than the technique.
- The hinge: egg yolks off the heatIn the Normandy version the three yolks are beaten in when ready to serve and the pan comes straight off the fire. Let that sauce return to a boil and it curdles into scrambled egg in wine; the residual heat is all the thickening you get.
- Buying eelEuropean eel (Anguilla anguilla) is critically endangered and CITES-listed, and American eel stocks are in decline. Farmed eel, usually sold frozen or already skinned and dressed, is the practical and defensible source. Ask the fishmonger to skin and clean it; the first recipe's business of twisting a knife blade through each cut section is a trick for gutting an eel without splitting it, not something a modern cook needs to reproduce.
- Eel bloodRaw eel serum contains a protein toxin that irritates skin and eyes and is dangerous if swallowed in quantity. It is destroyed by heat, so every one of these cooked dishes is safe, but rinse hands and boards after handling and keep the raw blood away from your eyes.
- The measuresA breakfast cupful is roughly 8-10 fl oz, so treat it as one generous cup. A wineglassful is about 2 fl oz, a liquor glass 1 to 1.5 fl oz, a dessertspoonful 2 teaspoons. Half a pint of claret is 8 fl oz by American measure and 10 by British; either quantity works here, and claret means a dry red Bordeaux-style wine.
- Mushroom catsupNot tomato ketchup. It was a thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, closer to a mushroom soy or Worcestershire in function. Three tablespoons of it carried most of the salt and umami in the Normandy sauce; a mushroom soy sauce or a good bottled mushroom ketchup is the honest substitute.
- Fish glaze and veloutéVelouté here is a light fish stock thickened with a blond roux. "Fish glaze" is fish stock reduced to a syrup — reduce a quart to a few tablespoons. Both were standing preparations in a hotel kitchen and would be made from scratch at home.
- "Boil gently until done"Eel is firm and gelatinous and tolerates real cooking, but two-inch pieces are done in 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer. The American-style jar-in-a-water-bath method takes its hour and a half because the heat transfer is so slow, not because eel needs it.
- Blanched oystersBlanched means dipped in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, perhaps 30 seconds. They then get five minutes more in the sauce, which is already at the outer limit; any longer and they tighten to erasers.
- YieldTwo large eels or three pounds will serve four to six as a main course. The Normandy version, at a pound and a half of eel plus oysters, quenelles and crayfish tails, is a four-person dish.
Matelote comes from matelot, sailor, and the name is generally traced to the freshwater fish stews of the French river regions — river fish, whatever came up in the net, stewed with wine, onions and a little brandy, thickened at the end and ringed with fried bread. Eel was the classic matelote fish because it is fatty enough to hold together in a long simmer and because it was cheap and abundant in European rivers. By the time Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's famous maître d'hôtel, compiled this book in 1896, matelote had been thoroughly absorbed into the international hotel repertoire, which is why the four variants that follow are labelled Normandy, American, Bordelaise and Poulette: the same fish run through four sauce grammars, exactly as a large brigade kitchen would teach it. The plain American version, eels sealed in a covered jar and set in a pan of water on the stove, is the outlier and the oldest-feeling of the group — a domestic method rather than a hotel one.