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Spiced Eels in Jelly
Cut the meat from a knuckle of veal into pieces; put in the saucepan with the bone, well broken; cover with cold water, add two onions and such herbs as may be desired and simmer until the meat is in rags. Take out the meat and bone, add the juice of a lemon and the whites of two eggs well beaten; bring to the boiling point and boil for five minutes. Throw in one-quarter of a cupful of cold water, set off the fire for ten minutes, then strain through a fine cloth. Salt to taste and set aside. Cut two pounds of eels into two-inch pieces, scald with boiling water, drain and put in a saucepan. Add one cupful of white vinegar and one pint of the veal broth, four cloves, a dozen whole pepper corns, a bay leaf, one slice of onion and one teaspoonful of sugar; heat to the boiling point and simmer ten minutes. Drain, place in a large dish, pour the veal stock over the eels and put in a cool place until the jelly sets. Serve garnished with lemon.
Two recipes in one: a clarified veal aspic, then eels poached in spiced vinegar and set in it. The stock does all the work, so make it a day ahead.
- Knuckle of vealThis is the veal shank or hock, bone and all, and it is what supplies the gelatin. Ask a butcher to saw it into rounds; "well broken" means exposing the marrow and cartilage. Nothing else in the recipe will set the jelly, so no substitution of boneless meat will work.
- "Until the meat is in rags"Three to four hours at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil, which clouds the stock. The recipe gives no weights; how much liquid you end with depends on the size of the knuckle and how deeply it is covered.
- The egg-white raftBeaten whites and lemon juice coagulate and trap the fine sediment. Do not stir once it starts to rise; the splash of cold water and the ten minutes off the heat let the raft settle so it can be lifted before straining. Line the sieve with a doubled square of muslin, not a paper towel.
- EelsBuy them cleaned and skinned. European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is CITES-listed and traded under restrictions; in North America the fish sold at Asian and Italian markets is generally American eel or farmed Japanese eel. Eel blood contains a protein toxin that is destroyed by cooking, which is one reason eel is never served raw.
- Test the setAcid weakens gelatin. Most of the vinegar leaves with the poaching liquid, which is drained, but the eels carry some of it into the dish; chill a spoonful of the stock on a saucer for five minutes before you assemble, and if it stays syrupy, soften a tablespoon of powdered gelatin in cold water and stir it into the warm stock.
- "A cool place"The refrigerator. This is a low-acid, high-protein jelly holding cooked fish, and a larder shelf is not cold enough. Give it four to six hours to set and eat it within two or three days.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 lb of eel set in the strained veal stock fills a dish of roughly 1.5 quarts and serves six to eight.
Eels in jelly belong to a long European tradition of preserving fish in its own or a borrowed gelatin, and they survive most visibly in the jellied eels of the London East End, where Thames and later Dutch eels were sold cheap from stalls and pie shops through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The version here is the parlour cousin of that street food: instead of letting the eel's own liquor set, it borrows a clarified veal aspic, the same egg-white-raft technique that turn-of-the-century American cookbooks applied to chicken, tongue and lobster. Aspic was a mark of accomplishment in those books because it demanded a long stock, a patient clarification and, crucially, a cold place to set it in an era when that meant an icebox or a cellar. Eel was still an ordinary market fish in America at the time, well before its stocks and its reputation declined.