Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Mayonnaise of Eels
Mayonnaise of Eels
Take an eel weighing from two to two and one-half pounds, clean, remove the head and skin and cut up in pieces about two and one-half inches in length; plunge them into salted water for a short time, then take out and wipe dry, and place in layers in a dish; sprinkle spice over each layer, pour over a little vinegar and water with a teaspoonful of isinglass dissolved in the water, and bake in a moderate oven. Take the pieces of eel out of the dish, put them in another, and when cold pour over a little mayonnaise sauce, garnish with a few springs of parsley, and serve.
A cold appetizer built on baked eel set with a little fish gelatin, then dressed at the last minute. The original assumes you can buy a whole eel and skin it yourself, and it gives neither times nor quantities, so the notes below fill in what a modern cook needs.
- Buy the eel dressedAsk the fishmonger to kill, skin and gut the eel and cut it into 2½-inch lengths; the skin is tough and slippery and the job is unpleasant at home. Eel is best bought very fresh or already gutted, as the flesh is fatty and turns quickly.
- Which eelEuropean eel (Anguilla anguilla) is listed on CITES Appendix II, and the EU has barred commercial export of the species since 2010; in North America you are more likely to be offered American eel or imported farmed Japanese eel. Either works here.
- IsinglassA collagen setting agent originally made from sturgeon swim bladders, sold in leaves or shreds and dissolved in warm liquid. Substitute plain powdered or leaf gelatin, roughly a scant teaspoon of powder, which gives the light jellied coating the recipe intends rather than a firm aspic.
- "Spice"The text says only "spice"; a mixed pickling spice of the period -- allspice, a few cloves, peppercorns, mace or bay -- is the likeliest reading. A pinch per layer is plenty; whole spices are easier to pick off before saucing.
- Oven and timeA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. Pieces that thick, sitting in a shallow bath of vinegar and water, will want roughly 25 to 30 minutes and should reach 145F at the bone; eel is at its best just cooked through and still moist, and dries out badly beyond that.
- The salted water"A short time" is unspecified; a quarter of an hour in a strong brine is a reasonable reading, and it firms the flesh. Wipe the pieces genuinely dry or the spice and liquid will not cling.
- Vinegar and waterThe recipe says only "a little"; something like one part wine vinegar to three parts water, poured in to come no more than halfway up the pieces, suits it. Keep the quantity small or the fish stews rather than bakes.
- Chill hard before saucingThe pieces must be fully cold and the jellied liquid set, or the mayonnaise will slacken and slide off. Sauce only at the moment of serving.
- YieldA 2 to 2½ lb eel gives four to six portions as a first course, or a small buffet platter.
Cold eel with mayonnaise belongs to the northern European repertoire that fed the Waldorf's kitchen in Oscar Tschirky's day — and it is tempting, if not demonstrable, to connect it to the Dutch, German and Ashkenazi traditions of jellied, smoked and soused eel, and to the immigrant cooks and Hudson and Delaware river fisheries of New York. Eel was cheap, abundant and unglamorous in nineteenth-century America, and the way to bring it onto a hotel menu was to treat it as the French treated cold fish: cook it in an acidulated liquor, set it lightly with isinglass, mask it in mayonnaise and garnish it with parsley. The isinglass is the period marker here. Commercial powdered gelatin was already available when this book appeared, but hotel kitchens still kept isinglass for clarifying and for delicate cold work. Eel has since gone the opposite way from most cheap fish — scarce, expensive and, in the European species, a conservation problem — so a dish that once read as thrift now reads as a luxury.