No. 2315

Eel Pie—Hot

Pate Chaud d'Anguilles

Cut into slices two pounds of skinned eels (No. 57), having it well cleaned, suppressing the head and thin parts; cut the remainder into three-inch pieces, and be careful to abstract all the blood; wash, wipe dry, then bone the pieces and separate the meats; lard each one with thin slices of truffle; lay the fish in a tureen, season and pour over a few spoonfuls of brandy or Madeira wine; let macerate for a couple of hours. Fry in a sautoir with some butter a few spoonfuls of shallots and mushrooms; lay in the eel fillets and let them simply harden while turning them over, then add the Madeira marinade and two spoonfuls of brown sauce (No. 414); at the first boil remove the sautoir from the fire and bestrew the fish with chopped parsley. Prepare a fish forcemeat (No. 90), finishing it with four spoonfuls of chopped truffles. Cover the bottom of a small baking sheet with a round sheet of heavy paper; on it set a buttered hot pie mold with hinges (Fig. 153); cover the bottom and sides with foundation paste (No. 135), and cover the paste with a layer of the fish forcemeat, then fill up the empty center with the eel fillets and fine herbs, alternating them with layers of forcemeat; fill till dome-shaped on top above the edge of the mold, then smooth it neatly and lay over another flat of the same paste, attaching it to the sides of the mold; fasten it to the projecting borders of the inside paste previously dampened with a brush; cut it away evenly, press it down and pinch it tastefully through its thickness. Make a small aperture on the summit of the dome; moisten the surface and decorate with imitation paste leaves, or any other fanciful design of the same, then brush over the entire top and border with egg; set the pie into a moderate oven to cook for an hour and a half, being careful to cover with a sheet of paper as soon as the paste is well dried. After taking the pie from the oven, lay it on a dish, unmold and pour into the inside through the aperture on top, a few spoonfuls of good half-glaze sauce (No. 413) reduced with Madeira wine.

← No. 2314 Patty a la Bontoux—Large, Hot Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2316 Fat Liver Pie, Alsatian—Large, Hot →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer assumes a professional brigade and a shelf of numbered base preparations, so most of the work here happens before the pie is assembled. The construction is a raised hot pie in a hinged mould, closer to a pâté en croûte than to anything you would call a pie today.

The hinge: build the crust to hold liquidFoundation paste (No. 135) is a stiff lining paste meant to act as a mould, not a flaky lid. It has to be rolled thick enough and sealed tightly at the seam, because at the end you pour hot Madeira demi-glace in through the vent and it must stay inside. A tender short crust or puff will slump when the mould comes off.
Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is not a fixed figure; somewhere in the region of 325-350F is a fair reading. Cover the top with a sheet of parchment or foil once the pastry has dried and coloured, as the recipe directs, or the dome will scorch long before the centre reaches temperature. An hour and a half is about right for a filling this dense; an instant-read thermometer through the vent should show at least 145-160F at the centre.
EquipmentA sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan. The hinged "hot pie mould" of Fig. 153 is a pâté en croûte mould with clips; a tall springform tin or a plain deep cake ring set on a paper-lined sheet will do the same job, provided the paste is thick enough to stand on its own once the ring comes away.
SpoonfulsRanhofer's "spoonful" is not standardised in this book and shifts with context. Read "a few spoonfuls of shallots and mushrooms" as a generous handful of each, finely chopped, and "two spoonfuls of brown sauce" as about 2 tablespoons of concentrated sauce, not a ladleful.
The numbered basesNo. 90 is a fish forcemeat, pounded lean fish; the nearest modern equivalent is a fish mousseline. No. 414 is a brown sauce and No. 413 a half-glaze; a good reduced demi-glace stands in for both, finished with Madeira for the sauce poured in at the end.
Bleeding and skinning the eelThe instruction to "abstract all the blood" is not fussiness. Fresh eel blood contains a protein toxin that irritates, and it is destroyed by cooking, but it also turns the forcemeat grey and muddy. Have the fishmonger kill, skin and gut the eel.
SourcingEel stocks are in poor shape worldwide and European eel is CITES-listed, so buy from a fishmonger who can tell you the source. Farmed Japanese-style unagi is not a substitute here, being already cooked and sweet-glazed.
TruffleLarding each fillet with thin slices of truffle was the ordinary luxury of a Delmonico's kitchen. Fresh black truffle is the intent; tinned truffle peelings in the forcemeat and a little truffle in the marinade get you most of the aroma at a fraction of the cost.
Yield and serviceTwo pounds of eel plus forcemeat should give a pie for roughly six to eight as an entree course. Serve it hot, cut in wedges from the mould, within a few minutes of adding the Madeira sauce, since the pastry begins to soften as soon as the liquid goes in.

A Little History

This is No. 2315 of Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the cross-referencing to numbered pastes, forcemeats and sauces is the whole method of the book: nothing is repeated, everything points elsewhere. Hot raised eel pie belongs to a long European tradition -- eel was cheap, fatty, kept well alive in tanks, and was a staple of both Lenten cookery and the London pie shop -- but Ranhofer's version is that tradition dressed for a Fifth Avenue dining room, with the coarse fish boned, larded with truffle, macerated in Madeira and bedded in a forcemeat named only by number. The hinged mould, the paste dome, the fanciful cut-out leaves and the sauce poured in through a vent at the last moment are all marks of the grande cuisine Ranhofer learned in France and carried into American restaurant practice. That eel appears at all is a reminder of how common it once was on this side of the Atlantic; American eel was landed in quantity in the Hudson and Delaware into the twentieth century, and has since almost vanished from the domestic table.