Slippery Beast by Ellen Ruppel Shell

Author:Ellen Ruppel Shell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams Press
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

The Bayeux Tapestry, a 270-foot-long work depicting the Norman conquest of England by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century, portrays Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson on a battlefield bordered by eels. In Celtic Brittany, holy wells were protected by “fairies” who appeared in the form of eels. Nobles had eels embroidered on their family crests. It’s been written that King Henry I suffered a wretched death after dining on “a surfeit of eels of which he was inordinately fond.” (Modern scholars suggest that the culprit was more likely contaminated lamprey, though this does not diminish the fact that Henry I was terribly fond of eel, as by no coincidence was his maternal grandson Henry II.) King Richard III, whose death in 1485 marked the end of the Middle Ages in England, stopped eel tariffs to encourage the import of eel from merchants “over seas, where they are abundant to London where they are dear.” (As mentioned earlier, what today is called the Netherlands, a low-lying land hovering just above sea level, was for centuries a haven for eels.) Chaucer and Shakespeare both mention eels in their writings, Shakespeare more frequently than he did any other fish. Italian writers and artists also made much of the eel: Leonardo da Vinci, who by all evidence was a vegetarian, nonetheless could not resist positioning a succulent dish of eels with orange slices in his immortal masterpiece The Last Supper.

In Europe, the demand for eel, always significant, grew further in the late nineteenth century due in part to the popularity of “hot smoking,” suspending eel over a smoky fire to flavor and preserve it. Hot smoking was no culinary newcomer—it traces back to the cavemen of the Paleolithic Era. But a renewed interest in the practice not only prompted a major expansion of the eel fishery but also elevated the eel’s status as a luxury food. As one observer wrote in 1908, “The eel, formerly a cheap folk food, has in general become a table fish, and smoked a delicacy, which can only be obtained for expensive money.” The introduction of trawlers equipped with wide, cone-shaped nets also boosted eel landings. This was true for both yellow and silver eels, and for glass eels and elvers, a fishery that started in France. Elvers were especially popular in Basque Country, where, sautéed in olive oil, garlic, and dried chilis, they remain today a traditional celebratory food, especially around the Christmas holidays.

In the Americas, it seems that eel was for those living east of the Mississippi what the buffalo was for those living in the west: the archaeological record shows that eel sustained large populations of indigenous people long before the advent of agriculture. Eel features prominently in folktales of the Algonquian and Haudenosaunee, and the Iroquois thought enough of the fish to name a clan in its honor. In what later would become Maine, the native Wabanaki people trapped eels in weirs and woven baskets, and speared them from canoes, luring them in with torches.

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