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Eel Patties (Boil a quart of milk thicken)
Boil a quart of milk, thicken it with a heaping tablespoonful of dissolved flour. Add to it three pounds of cold boiled eels divided into small pieces, season with salt and pepper, and send to table. Put the hot water dish on the chafing dish frame, put in a pint of hot water, place the chafing dish proper over this and put in an ounce of butter, stir it until of a creamy consistency, add the milk and eel and stir until quite thick, then fill hot patty shells and serve. If liked, a can of mushrooms chopped up may be added.
The chafing dish can be dispensed with and eel patties served as a course for dinner.
A chafing-dish creamed fish, written for a cook who already had boiled eel in the larder. The method is a thin béchamel finished over hot water and spooned into pastry cases.
- The hinge: it is a double boilerThe "hot water dish" with a pint of hot water under the "chafing dish proper" is simply a bain-marie. Any milk-and-flour sauce holding flaked fish will catch and scorch over direct heat, which is why the whole apparatus exists. A stainless bowl over simmering water, or a heavy pan on the lowest flame with constant stirring, does the same job.
- QuantitiesA quart of milk is 4 cups; a pint of water, 2 cups; an ounce of butter, 2 tablespoons. Three pounds of cooked eel against a quart of milk is a very generous fish-to-sauce ratio, and the quantity is easily halved.
- "Dissolved flour"Flour slaked in a little cold milk or water to a smooth cream, then stirred into the hot milk — an alternative to a roux. One heaping tablespoon to a quart gives a notably thin sauce; the fish itself, and continued stirring over the water bath, must do most of the rest of the thickening.
- Cold boiled eelsThe recipe assumes leftovers. Eel is boned after cooking, not before: the flesh lifts off the central spine in two long fillets. The skin is thick and gelatinous and is usually removed before cooking, though it can also be lifted away from the cooked flesh.
- Sourcing eel nowEuropean eel is critically endangered and trade in it is restricted; American and Japanese eel stocks are also in serious decline. Smoked eel from a monitored fishery is the usual route today, and it needs no boiling — check a current sustainability guide before buying. Firm white fish or smoked haddock stands in without altering the method.
- Patty shellsThese are baked puff-pastry cases — vol-au-vents — sold frozen in some supermarkets. They must be hot and filled at the last moment, or the sauce softens the pastry base.
- Canned mushroomsThe optional can of mushrooms was a convenience item of the day and carries a flat, brined taste. Half a pound of button mushrooms, sliced and cooked dry in butter until the liquid has gone, does more for the sauce.
- SeasoningEel is rich and the sauce is bland by design. Beyond salt and pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of dry sherry stirred in at the end are all period-appropriate and keep the dish from tasting merely of flour and milk.
Eel was cheap, abundant and unglamorous in nineteenth-century America — taken from tidal rivers along the whole eastern seaboard and sold by the pound in city markets. The presentation, however, is entirely of its moment: the chafing dish had become a middle-class fashion in the 1890s, promoted through a small industry of dedicated cookbooks, and it let a hostess finish a dish at the table without a servant. Creamed fish in a puff-pastry case follows the older French vol-au-vent, thoroughly domesticated by this point into the American "patty." That the author bothers to add that the chafing dish "can be dispensed with" suggests the equipment was newer to many readers than the recipe was.