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Eels
Mrs. P. B. Ayer.
Skin and parboil them; cleanse the back bone of all coagulations; cut them in pieces about three inches ir length; dip in flour and cook in pork fat, brown,
Four lines and no quantities, which is how confident nineteenth-century cooks wrote about a fish everyone could buy. The instructions hold up; what needs saying is how to buy eel now and how long each stage should actually take.
- SkinningEel skin is tough and does not scrape off like scales. The standard method is to cut through the skin behind the head, grip the flap with a cloth or pliers and peel it back toward the tail in one piece. Any fishmonger selling eel will do this on request, which is worth asking for.
- "Coagulations" on the backboneThis is the dark clotted blood that lies in the cavity along the spine. Scrape it out with a thumbnail or the tip of a spoon under running water. Left in, it turns bitter and muddy in the pan.
- ParboilingFive to eight minutes in salted water for pieces of this size is enough. Eel is fatty and firm; the parboil is there to set the flesh and make the residual fat render cleanly, not to cook it through. Longer and the pieces begin to fall off the bone before they ever reach the fat.
- Eel bloodRaw eel serum contains a protein toxin that is an irritant if it gets into a cut or the eyes. It is destroyed by heat, so parboiled and fried eel is entirely safe, but handle the raw fish with intact hands and rinse the board well.
- Pork fatRendered lard or the fat from fried salt pork. Roughly a quarter inch in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Bacon fat is the closest everyday substitute; a neutral oil works but gives up the pork flavour the recipe is built around.
- Dredging and fryingDry the parboiled pieces thoroughly before flouring or the coating slides off. Season the flour with salt and pepper; the original does not mention seasoning. Three to four minutes a side gives the brown crust intended.
- Buying eel todayAmerican eel is still sold, mostly live or freshly killed at Asian and Italian markets, and around Christmas in places with a Southern European tradition. European eel is critically endangered and its international trade is restricted, so check what you are being offered.
- YieldA whole eel of 1.5 to 2 lb, cut into three-inch lengths, serves two to three. The fish is rich enough that little else is needed alongside it.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women, sold for charity, and copied widely enough to spawn imitators across the Midwest and Canada. Eel appears in it without comment or apology because it was then a cheap, common market fish: the American eel, Anguilla rostrata, spawns in the Sargasso Sea and runs far up the Mississippi and St. Lawrence systems, so barrels of salted and fresh eel reached inland cities easily. The dish here is the plainest possible treatment, and the frying in pork fat rather than butter marks it as everyday cooking rather than company food. Eel's near-disappearance from American tables over the following century is usually traced to a combination of collapsing stocks, dams blocking the upriver migration, and a shift in taste; it survives mainly in immigrant communities where it remains a Christmas Eve fixture.