Home › Fish, Eggs, and Sauces › Richmond Eel Pie
Richmond Eel Pie
(England.) Skin, clean, and cut up 2 large eels, wash and dry them and cook with 1 ounce of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of chopped mushrooms, a tablespoonful of chopped parsley, 1 minced onion, a bayleaf, salt, pepper, rind of a lemon, 1 glass of sherry, and a cup of consomme. Cook until the eels are tender, strain the sauce and thicken it with flour and butter. Line a deep dish with pastry, arrange the eels in it and pour the sauce over, with sliced hard-boiled eggs on top. Then cover with a lid of thin pastry, ornamented with leaves of the same, glaze with yolk of an egg and bake it 1 hour in a moderate oven, serve hot or cold.
A two-stage pie: the eel is stewed and the sauce finished before anything touches pastry, which is what keeps the filling from flooding the crust. A few of the measures need translating.
- Buying the eelTwo large eels means roughly 2 to 2.5 lb of cleaned eel, enough for a deep 9-inch dish serving six. European eel is CITES-listed and under strict quota; buy from a fishmonger who can tell you the source, or substitute a firm oily fish such as conger, monkfish tail or mackerel fillet, adjusting the stewing time down sharply.
- SkinningAsk the fishmonger to skin, gut and cut the eel into 2-inch sections. Done at home it wants a nail through the head, a cut behind the gills and pliers. Eel blood contains a protein toxin that is destroyed by heat, so keep it off broken skin and out of your eyes while cleaning; the cooked fish is entirely safe.
- A glass of sherryIn English cookbooks of this period a wine glass is 2 to 2.5 fl oz. Use a scant third of a cup of dry or medium sherry, not a modern tumbler's worth.
- ConsommeSimply a clear, well-flavoured stock: use 1 cup of good chicken or fish stock. It should be unsalted or lightly salted, since it reduces and is then thickened.
- Rind of a lemonPare it in strips with a peeler, avoiding the pith, and fish the strips out with the bayleaf before straining. Grated zest cannot be removed and will dominate the sauce.
- The hinge: cook the eel first, and not too farStew gently, covered, until the flesh comes cleanly from the bone, usually 20 to 25 minutes for thick eel. Eel is fat enough to stay moist, but overcooked it shreds and the pie has no texture. Let the eel and sauce cool completely before filling the pastry, or the bottom crust turns to paste.
- ThickeningStrain the cooking liquid, then whisk in a beurre manie of 1 tablespoon each of soft butter and flour, kneaded together. Simmer two minutes. Aim for a sauce that coats a spoon heavily; it thins in the oven.
- OvenA moderate oven is 350F. An hour at that heat is generous for a filling that is already cooked, so cover the pastry loosely with foil once it has taken good colour, at around 35 minutes.
- Hot or coldEaten cold the sauce sets to a light jelly, eel being naturally gelatinous, which is why the recipe offers both. If you intend to serve it cold, hold back a little of the flour so the sauce sets rather than stiffens.
The name points to Richmond upon Thames, and behind it to Eel Pie Island at neighbouring Twickenham, a small ait in the river whose inn was known through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for selling eel pies to Londoners arriving by steamer and rowing boat on their day excursions upriver; Dickens sends the Kenwigs party there in Nicholas Nickleby. The Thames once yielded eels in enormous numbers, and eel pie, stewed eel and jellied eel were cheap urban food long before they became a curiosity. The version here, with sherry, mushrooms, consomme and a glazed pastry lid ornamented with leaves, is the dish dressed up for a late-Victorian or Edwardian dinner table rather than eaten from a riverside counter. Its appearance in a book of foreign dishes for the travelling cook is characteristic: England is represented by something a reader might have tasted on a Thames outing and wanted to reproduce at home.