Eels

Have any of you had eels? Jellied eels are still a food associated with the East End in London, and smoked eel still shows up. Interestingly, the people who actually like eel as a food tend to dislike this, saying that the flavor is ruined by this preparation for long-term storage. I wouldn't know myself. They are also cold smoked to be kept around for stews and pies. I recall eel pie being mentioned in older literature, but eels are mostly mentioned as well, just eels. They were fried or roasted with some herbs and you ate them. This made them accessible to the poor, but they were not regarded as a poor person's food as they have been for the last century or two.  Everyone ate them. King Henry I, who had been warned repeatedly by his physician that because eels always gave him indigestion and were thus likely dangerous to him, decided he just plain liked them too mauch not to eat lots of them and famously died of eating "a surfeit of eels." They may have actually been lampreys, because the word translates either way, but we are going to be pro-eel for today and give them credit for the regicide.

There were other untimely eel-related deaths among the royalty and nobility, but none so direct as this.

There are eels in North America, in China and Japan, and they are - or were - eaten there in quantity.  But Europe was where eels were part of the culture, and nowhere more than in England. Over a thousand years the english ate more eels than any other fish, saltwater or freshwater. I got this from the Surprised Eel Historian who notes that it is the historian that is surprised, not the eels.  He wonders how he got into this line of work after starting out as a respectable historian.  For the quick eel news, his threadreader is here. Half a million eels a year paid in rent. (Or were they? There may be a translation and reference problem here.) They were used for debts, especially for rent money to landlords. The difficulty is that rents were often due on the same holidays throughout the year, so a large landholder might have thousands of eels arrive in the last few days. You can't keep them alive in water as they deplete the oxygen, but there is some method of putting them in wet moss for shipping.

You flayed them alive, though in London the eel-sellers would do this for you, thank God.

They were shipped everywhere. The English, the eel-eating champions by general acclaim throughout Europe, imported lots of them from the Dutch beginning around 1400, because even though they produced many more eels than anyone else, they just couldn't get enough.  Though this declined, this continued until the 1930s. Though they were declared unclean in Leviticus, they were preferred for Lent, as they seemed to reproduce asexually, and were therefore considered less spiritually dangerous. They actually reproduce by coming to sexual maturity just before migrating to the Sargasso Sea at the end of their lives. This is called their silver stage. Like us, I guess. The eels you see are technically juveniles, even though they can be years old and grow up to 20 feet long. An idea that makes me nervous, frankly.

Eels in Art and Literature, Briefly

Aristotle mentions them, but Aristotle mentions everything, so it nearly doesn't count. Freud had a sexual interpretation of them, and ditto.

The first English mention is by the Venerable Bede (c. 700), who tells us that England is well known for its eels and salmon. He claims that the town of Ely is so named because they have so many eels there. This is the sort of just-so etymology that usually turns out to be laughable, but in this case it is true.

There are eels in the Bayeux Tapestry; many along the borders as part of the decoration, but one symbolising England itself, which King William is grabbing by the tail. This is the wrong way to catch an eel, as one must grab it by the head, and this visually predicted that William would lose England. If it seems odd that an eel would be so readily associated with England, as a bear would represent Russia or an Eagle the USA, it is likely a product of the extreme fondness for them.

Shakespeare mentions eels more than any other fish.

In more modern times they are the stuff of nightmares, as in the shrieking eels in The Princess Bride and the moray eels of "The Little Mermaid." We shall not speak of them further. There is The Book of Eels, that is described by its publisher as about more than just eels, but a reflection on human life as a whole. Well, that's fascinating, but we do that ourselves without eels.