Eel au Vert

Anguilles au vert teaches a severe and useful lesson: green is not a garnish here. It is the sauce. Sorrel, nettles, parsley, chervil, tarragon, salad burnet, savory, thyme, and sage are ciseled into a living mass, softened in butter, and made to carry the eel through wine and a yolk-lemon liaison. If the herbs are timid, the dish becomes only cold eel in pale sauce.

The original entry begins with two pounds of small eel and assumes a kitchen hand to skin it, a saucier to guard four yolks, and a cold larder waiting for the bowl. This home version halves every stated quantity for four first-course servings and measures the butter and handfuls the old kitchen left to judgment. It calls for neither a stock never off the fire nor a salamander, so neither is invented. The fishmonger replaces the eel-skinning hand, and lifting the cooked pieces before thickening lets one cook whisk the liaison without breaking them. Skinning live eel and keeping extra hands nearby were brigade scaffolding. The herb mass, wine simmer, yolk liaison, and thorough chilling are the dish, and they stay.

Very cold, the sauce should cling with a quiet satin gloss, sharp from sorrel and wine, rounded by yolk, with the eel tender around its central bone. The one moment that decides everything is the liaison: temper the yolks, keep the heat low, and stop the instant the sauce coats the spoon.