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Eel Pie

Fish

Dish of eel pieces with butter, currants and sweet spices under a pastry cover (Robert May 1660, Glasse 1747, Rundell 1807, etc).


Original Receipt in 'The Accomplisht Cook' by Robert May, 1660 (Robert May 1660);

To bake Eels in Pye, Dish or Patty-pan.
Take good fresh water eels, draw, and flay them, cut them in pieces, and season them with pepper, salt, and nutmeg, lay them in a pye with some prunes, currans, grapes, gooseberries, or Barberries, large mace, slic't dates and butter, close it up and bake it, being baked, liquor it with white-wine, sugar, and butter, and ice it.
If you bake it in a dish in paste, bake it in cold butter paste, rost the eel, & let it be cold, season it with nutmeg pepper, ginger, cinamon, and salt, put butter on the paste, and lay on the eel with a few sweet herbs chopped, and grated bisket-bread, grapes, currans, dates, large mace, and butter, close it up and bake it, liquor it, and ice it.

Otherways.
Take good fresh water eels; flay and draw them, season 357 Bb3 them with nutmeg, pepper, and salt, being cut in pieces, lay them in the pie, and put to them some two or three onions in quaters, some butter, large mace, grapes, barberries or gooseberries, close them up and bake them; being baked liquor them with beaten butter, beat up thick with the yolks of two eggs, and slices of an orange.
Sometimes you may bake them with a minced onion, some raisins of the sun, and season them with some ginger, pepper, and salt.



It seems that by the 18th Century Eel Pie was sufficiently well-known for Bradley 1728 to say that; "The Eel is also good in Pyes, fry'd and boil'd, which every one knows how to prepare."

See:
Crustardes of Fleshe
Richmond Eel Pie


For other types of fish pie see:
Carp Pie
Eel Pie
Fish Pie
Lyme Bay Fish Pie
Salmon Pie
Smoked Fish Pie
Suffolk Fish Pie





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