Consider the Eel
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- US$19.99
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- US$19.99
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Journalist Richard Schweid first learned the strange facts of the freshwater eel’s life from a fisherman in a small Spanish town just south of Valencia. “The eeler who explained the animal’s life cycle to me did so as he served up an eel he had just taken from a trap, killed, cleaned, and cooked in olive oil in an earthenware dish,” writes Schweid. “I ate it with a chunk of fresh, crusty bread. It was delicious. I was immediately fascinated.”
As this engaging culinary and natural history reveals, the humble eel is indeed an amazing creature. Every European and American eel begins its life in the Sargasso Sea — a vast, weedy stretch of deep Atlantic waters between Bermuda and the Azores. Larval eels drift for up to three years until they reach the rivers of North America or Europe, where they mature and live as long as two decades before returning to the Sargasso to mate and die. Eels have never been bred successfully in captivity.
Consulting fisherfolk, cooks, and scientists, Schweid takes the reader on a global tour to reveal the economic and gastronomic importance of eel in places such as eastern North Carolina, Spain, Northern Ireland, England, and Japan. (While this rich yet mild-tasting fish has virtually disappeared from U.S. tables, over $2 billion worth of eel is still eagerly consumed in Europe and Asia each year.) The book also includes recipes, both historic and contemporary, for preparing eel.
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While Spanish, German, Irish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese and especially Japanese people place Anguillae well above salmon in their cuisines, Americans, by and large, consider eels to be bait. Thus, North American estuaries have the best remaining migratory wild eel populations; that fact provides a good foundation for a light science travelogue shuttling back and forth between eel capitals on both sides of the Atlantic. Schweid (The Cockroach Papers) tries to fill in the gaps in the eel's astonishing natural history and tie that to sketches of fishery traditions, folklore, literary excerpts and reportage (beware the natural history that includes this many ingredients), mostly by focusing on the erratic transatlantic economy that eel supply (here) and demand (there) creates. Schweid visits five of the traditional eeling waters in Europe, but mostly he's concerned with recording the yarns of North Carolina's Outer Banks eel-fishing culture, where small-scale U.S. "eelers" operating inshore catch and ship tons of wriggling eels to Europe and Japan. Schweid is searching hard for a handle on his slimy, reclusive subject, but even science is not much help: the migratory Atlantic genus has been so resistant to study that even strong commercial imperatives (immature eels have fetched $500 a pound) have not yielded a true eel aquaculture. An overview of such an enigmatic creature that ranges over a huge ocean and inshore ecology is all that can be expected from this slim book; still, anyone with a curiosity about the sea will find Schweid's taste of the eel strangely appealing.
