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Potted Eels
After cleaning the eels cut them into three-inch lengths; bone and season well with salt, black pepper and a small quantity of mace; pack them closely in jars and leave for a few hours; then cover them with a plain water-paste and bake in a moderate oven. The eels will be cooked in about an hour; take them out of the oven and leave until cold; then take off the paste and pour a little clarified butter over them.
This is a preserving recipe dressed up as a bake: the flour-and-water crust is a disposable lid, and the clarified butter is the seal that was meant to let the jars sit in a larder for weeks. That seal is exactly the problem.
- Why the butter seal failsFat poured over cooked fish creates an oxygen-free layer at the top of the jar, and the recipe gives no acid, no measured salt, and no holding temperature. That is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum, including the type E strains associated with fish and aquatic sediments, which grow without air and produce toxin you cannot see, smell or taste.
- The bake is not a processAn hour in a moderate oven inside a paste-capped jar cooks the flesh but is nowhere near a validated heat treatment for a sealed, low-acid, anaerobic pack. Spores survive it easily, and the slow cooling the recipe calls for holds the fish in the range where survivors multiply.
- No quantities, no controls"Season well with salt" and "a small quantity of mace" are the whole preservation system. Modern potted or canned fish relies on weighed salt, measured acidity, or pressure processing to specified times and temperatures. None of that can be reconstructed from this text. If you want potted fish, use a current tested recipe.
- Eels themselvesThe European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is listed as critically endangered and is CITES-regulated, with export from the EU banned. American eel stocks are also depleted and tightly managed. Wild eel in the quantity this recipe assumes was ordinary in 1896 and is not now.
- "A plain water-paste"Flour and water worked into a stiff dough, of the kind period cooks called huff paste (related to the older "coffin"), used as a sacrificial lid rather than as pastry to eat. The recipe's instruction to "take off the paste" confirms it was not meant for the table. The book itself gives no name and no fat, leavening or seasoning.
- "A moderate oven"The book gives no temperature. In this period the term is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F. Oscar's readers were working a coal range; any number here is a modern translation, not an endorsement of the method.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and lighter than the nut itself. Still sold ground or as blades, and one of the standard potting spices alongside cayenne and clove.
Potting was the English answer to a glut before tinning arrived: cooked meat or fish packed tight in an earthenware jar and sealed under a cap of clarified butter, which set hard and kept air off. Eels suited it particularly well because they are fatty, because Thames and Fenland eels were cheap and abundant, and because London had a long trade in them: jellied eels, eel pies and eel-and-pie shops were working-class staples through the nineteenth century. That this appears in a New York hotel book at all reflects how much of Oscar Tschirky's repertoire was inherited from English and continental practice rather than invented in the hotel; a large kitchen in the 1890s still preserved as a matter of routine, since mechanical refrigeration was new and unevenly trusted. The huff-paste crust here is older still, a survival of the medieval "coffin" — pastry used as a cooking vessel, and often not eaten with the dish itself.