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Eels, Emstel
Tear off skin, draw and wipe one and a half pounds very fresh eels. Cut in two-inch-long pieces and keep on plate until required. Heat one ounce butter in a saucepan, add four finely chopped shallots and brown two minutes, adding one and a half ounces flour stir well pour in a pint white broth, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley one nutmeg leaf, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper, a tablespoon vinegar and juice of half a sound lemon. Mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then boil ten minutes. Add eels and simmer on range thirty minutes. Pour into a deep dish, arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around and serve.
A straightforward brown-roux stew of eel in stock sharpened with vinegar and lemon. Most of the work is in the sourcing and in not overcooking the fish.
- Buying the eelVery few fishmongers will skin and gut eel to order, and the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is critically endangered and CITES-listed, so what you find will normally be farmed Japanese or American eel. Ask for it cleaned and cut; failing that, smoked eel is not a substitute here, as the stew depends on raw flesh releasing gelatin into the sauce.
- MeasuresAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; 1½ ounces flour is roughly 1/3 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them make about 3/4 teaspoon white pepper — assertive but in keeping with the vinegar. The pint of broth is a US pint, 2 cups.
- "White broth"A light, unbrowned veal or chicken stock, unsalted or barely salted. A pale fish stock works and suits the dish, but avoid anything dark or heavily reduced; the sauce should stay ivory rather than gravy-coloured.
- "One nutmeg leaf"Ambiguous. Nutmeg has no culinary leaf; this may be a blade of mace — the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed — or simply a bay leaf. If you have neither, a small grating of nutmeg into the finished sauce gets close.
- The hinge: cooking timeThirty minutes at a simmer is longer than most cooks would give two-inch pieces today, and the eel may end up collapsing off the bone. Twelve to eighteen minutes is usually enough, depending on thickness; the flesh should just part from the central bone. Boil the sauce its full ten minutes first so the flour is cooked out, then add the fish.
- SkimmingEel is oily and will throw a good deal of fat as it cooks. Skim before serving or the sauce reads greasy rather than rich; the acid from the vinegar and lemon is there to cut it, and it cannot do that job alone.
- The croutonsTriangles or hearts of crustless white bread fried in butter until crisp, arranged around the rim at the last moment. Put them on the dish after the stew, not before, or they soften into paste.
- YieldA pound and a half of cleaned eel serves three as a main course, four as a first course with the croutons doing the work of a starch.
Eel was one of the great everyday proteins of northern Europe: fatty, cheap, sold live from tanks, and abundant in the rivers and drained polders of the Low Countries and northwest Germany well into the twentieth century. What "Emstel" refers to is unclear; grand-hotel compilations of this period attach such place-labels loosely and without explanation, and the name may be a garbling of a Dutch or German river name. The method itself is a standard Continental treatment: a brown shallot roux, a pale stock, and a sharp finish of vinegar and lemon to balance an oily fish, in the same family as the Belgian anguilles au vert and the Dutch stewed eel of the same era. What has changed is the supply. The European eel's catastrophic decline since the 1970s, and the trade restrictions that followed, turned a poor man's river fish into a delicacy — the reverse of the trajectory most of this book's ingredients have taken.