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Ragout of Eels
(Normandy.) Cut up and fry in butter 1 1/2 pounds of eels, add 1 glass of white wine or cider, 1 tablespoonful of mushroom ketchup, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. After 10 minutes add 1/2 pint of white stock, 6 mushrooms, 12 oysters, 6 forcemeat balls (made of fish, chicken, or veal.), and 6 shrimps, all cooked. Stir, and add the yolks of 2 eggs and serve at once.
SALT COD (as cooked on the coast of Spain.).
Soak and parboil 2 pounds of cod. Serve with a sauce of tomatoes, onions, green peppers, olive oil and stock, in proper proportions, with herbs and seasoning, then arrange with a border of fried potatoes.
Two Norman and Spanish coastal dishes run together in one entry, both written for a cook who was expected to know the proportions already. The eel ragout is the more demanding of the two, and it turns on one step.
- The hinge: the egg yolksThe yolks are a liaison, not a sauce base. Pull the pan off the heat, slacken the yolks with a few spoonfuls of the hot liquid, stir them back in and serve immediately. If the pan returns to a simmer the sauce will curdle into scrambled egg.
- A glass of wine"A glass" is loose in books of this period: a wineglassful was commonly reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the word is often used for anything up to a small tumbler, so 2 to 4 fl oz is the sensible range. Dry cider is the more Norman choice and worth taking literally here.
- White stockAn unroasted stock, traditionally veal or chicken. Half a pint is 1 cup by American measure; if you are reading a British edition of the period, 10 fl oz. Fish stock works and suits the dish, though it was not what was meant.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice extract, nothing like tomato ketchup. It is still sold, and a tablespoon of it or of a mushroom soy or good Worcestershire supplies the same savoury depth.
- Everything goes in cookedThe recipe specifies that the mushrooms, oysters, shrimps and forcemeat balls all go in "cooked," so they are garnishes needing only to heat through; no time is given, but since the yolks follow immediately, keep it brief. Oysters held long in a hot pan shrink and go rubbery.
- Forcemeat ballsSmall dumplings of finely minced fish, chicken or veal bound with egg and breadcrumbs, poached or fried separately. A modern cook can substitute small quenelles or simply omit them without harming the dish.
- Buying and preparing eelEel is sold skinned and cut into sections; ask the fishmonger to do it. Fresh eel blood contains a protein irritant that is destroyed by cooking, so avoid tasting the raw fish or handling it with cuts on your hands. European eel is critically endangered and its international trade is restricted, so buy from a source that can tell you the species and origin.
- Salt cod: soaking is not optionalTwo pounds of hard salt cod needs 24 to 48 hours in the refrigerator in several changes of cold water before the parboil. "In proper proportions" for the sauce is genuinely undefined here; a workable reading is roughly equal weights of tomato and onion with one or two peppers, softened in oil and loosened with stock.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; on the quantities here it would stretch to about four as a main course, or six as one course in a longer meal of the sort the book assumes.
Normandy eats eel and drinks cider, and this ragout puts both to work: the region's rivers and marshland ditches supplied eel in quantity well into the twentieth century, and cider stood in for the white wine of regions further south. The heaped garnish of oysters, shrimps, mushrooms and forcemeat balls is older than the book, a survival of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ragoût in which the sauce was a vehicle for a whole assembly of small cooked items rather than a dressing for one fish. The pairing with a Spanish salt cod in the same paragraph is a fair sign of what sort of book this is: a traveller's collection, gathered along coastlines and written down for readers at home who were assumed to know what white stock and forcemeat were without being told.