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Eels with Peas
(Anguille coi piselli) Cook the eels as above with the onion sauce and when it is cooked remove it dry to cook the green peas in the sauce. The pieces of eel should be put back in the sauce to be warmed. No tomato sauce is necessary here. 120
This is a follow-on recipe: it assumes you have just read the preceding entry for eels in onion sauce and simply redirects it. The stray "120" at the end is the original page number, not an ingredient or a quantity.
- The sauce it refers toThe "onion sauce" is that of the preceding entry, which this page assumes you have read; it is an onion-and-oil base in which the eel cooks. Since that recipe is not reproduced here, any account of its exact method — the quantities, the seasoning, the length of the pieces — is reconstruction rather than what the book states.
- The hingeRemove the eel before the peas go in and keep it apart, returning it at the end only to warm through. The likely reason is to spare the fish the ten or fifteen minutes the peas need, though the recipe itself gives no reason.
- PeasThe original means fresh shelled peas — roughly 3 lb in the pod for 1 lb shelled. Frozen peas are a fair substitute but need two or three minutes only, so add them almost at the same moment you return the eel.
- How much liquidOnion sauce alone will not braise peas. Expect to loosen the pan with a few tablespoons of water as the peas cook, adding it a little at a time so you finish with a glossy sauce rather than a soup.
- Why no tomatoThe note that "no tomato sauce is necessary" distinguishes this from the many Italian eel preparations built on conserva. Here the sweetness of the peas and onion carries the dish, and tomato acid would flatten it.
- Buying eelFresh eel is sold cleaned and cut, usually skin-on; the skin holds the pieces together in the pan. European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is now a protected and CITES-listed species with tightly restricted trade, so buy from a fishmonger who can tell you the source, or use farmed eel.
- DonenessCut eel in 2-inch lengths is done in about 15 minutes over moderate heat — the flesh should just release from the central bone. Eel tolerates being cooked through better than most fish, but not being held hot.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of cleaned eel with 1 lb of shelled peas serves four as a main course, with bread to take up the oil.
This is one of a run of eel recipes in Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), a slim volume aimed at American households curious about Italian cooking, and its brevity is characteristic: the recipes are written as variations on one another, in the manner of Pellegrino Artusi, whose La scienza in cucina is often suggested as a model behind the book, though the resemblance is a matter of inference rather than documentation. Eel was cheap, abundant and unfussy about water quality, which made it a staple of the Adriatic lagoons and the Po delta — Comacchio in particular built an entire economy on eel fisheries — and it carried a strong seasonal association with Christmas Eve and other lean days when meat was forbidden. Pairing it with piselli follows a broad Italian habit of cooking spring peas down in oil and onion with whatever protein is at hand, the same logic that produces piselli col prosciutto. That eel now reads as an exotic ingredient in English-speaking kitchens, while peas are the ordinary half of the dish, is a reversal of how a reader in 1919 would have seen it.