To Fry Eels
Skin them, wash well, season with pepper and salt, roll each piece in fine Indian meal, fry in boiling lard; or egg them, and roll in cracker-crumbs and fry. For sauce, use melted butter sharpened with lemon-juice.
A plain fry that needs almost nothing translated except the meal, the fat temperature, and the sauce, which is not what a modern cook means by "melted butter."
- Indian mealCornmeal. "Fine Indian meal" means a fine grind rather than the coarse stone-ground sort; fine yellow cornmeal or a 50/50 mix of cornmeal and flour gives the closest coating.
- "Boiling lard"Lard does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble furiously the moment food goes in, roughly 350-375F. Below that the cornmeal absorbs grease and slides off.
- Melted butter sauceIn a nineteenth-century American cookbook "melted butter" is a sauce, not a puddle of butter: butter worked with a little flour and thinned with hot water or milk, then finished with lemon juice. A modern beurre blanc or simply browned butter with lemon serves the same purpose.
- Buying eelEuropean eel (Anguilla anguilla) is listed on CITES Appendix II, and EU export and import have been closed since 2010, so it is seldom available outside Europe. American eel or farmed Japanese eel is the usual substitute, though both are themselves depleted stocks; look for them live or freshly killed at Asian and Italian fishmongers, and ask to have the fish killed and skinned there.
- SkinningEel skin is tough and the flesh under it is slippery. The usual method is to nail or clamp the head, cut the skin through in a ring below it, and peel it back with pliers or a cloth. Coarse salt on the hands and the fish makes it manageable.
- Cooking throughEel is fatty and firm and does not dry out quickly, but raw eel blood contains a protein toxin that heat destroys, so this is not a fish to serve rare. Cut into 2- to 3-inch lengths and fry until the flesh is opaque to the bone, about 6-8 minutes, 145F internal.
- The egg-and-cracker variantCracker-crumbs means dried, rolled soda or water crackers rather than sweetened biscuit. Plain unsalted saltines crushed fine are the nearest thing; panko fries similarly but tastes lighter.
- YieldOne eel of 1 1/2 to 2 lb, skinned and cut into lengths, feeds three or four as a main course.
Eels were a staple of American river and tidewater cooking long before they became a specialty item, cheap, abundant, and easy to catch in weirs and pots from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi. That a Southern compendium like The Dixie Cook Book gives them two lines and no fuss tells you how ordinary they were: no instruction on where to get one, because anyone near water knew. The coating may hint at an American rather than an English treatment, though the evidence is not conclusive; "Indian meal" was the standard nineteenth-century term for cornmeal, distinguishing it from wheat flour, and it was current in Britain and Ireland as well, where imported American cornmeal went by that name. Dredging fish in it is the same habit that produced fried catfish and cornmeal-crusted trout. Eel has since gone the other way. American eel populations have declined sharply, the European species is under international trade restriction, and the fish that once fed poor households in quantity now reaches most tables only as Japanese unagi.