The Book of Eels

It hunts by night and it travels by night. The extraordinary journeys that occupy the first and last stages of its life are undertaken away from our seeing eye. And in between, when it is never further away from us than the nearest piece of water, it keeps itself to itself. Were you minded to look, you could find it anywhere from Iceland, around Scandinavia, through the Baltic, down western Europe to the northern coast of Africa as far east as the west coast of Turkey; and on the other side of the Atlantic from Greenland and Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico and Venezuela. Millions of people live within a bicycle ride of its home and know nothing of it. Even those moved to investigate its secrets find them extraordinarily hard to crack. There are mountains of learned papers dealing with the most recondite aspects of the eel’s physiology and behaviour, but while much is now known, many mysteries remain.

What we do know about this extremely common creature stretches credibility. I am well aware that the same is said of many of the inhabitants of the world about us. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ we exclaim at our television sets as the professional haunter of rainforest or tropical reef lays bare the means by which some furry tree-dweller secures its foodstore or some gristly mollusc ensnares its prey. But the fate of tiny hedge beasts and flashing reef fish, the birds of marsh and moor, even the soft-eyed, warm-blooded mammals of the sea, does not directly affect our lives, because they do not figure in our diets.

We like to think that we know most things about the animals we have admitted to our food chain (although, as BSE demonstrated, never enough). Through studying their habits we have subjugated them to our ends. We have learned to make them bigger, leaner, more fertile, not fertile at all – anything to suit our convenience. We rearrange the genetic composition of cows to equip them with udders so huge they cannot walk. We mutate the chicken into a beakless, shackled, egg-producing machine. We imprison pigs in the darkness, and make monsters of them. We cram the silver salmon – born to roam the seas – into cages, feed them on the processed flesh of other fish treated with dye to make their flesh pink, dose them with cocktails of virulent chemicals to discourage sea lice from eating them alive, then try to convince ourselves that we are giving ourselves a ‘natural’, ‘healthy’ form of nourishment.

But, although the flesh of the freshwater eel has been prized ever since Mesolithic man first loped through the forest to the water’s edge and stabbed down his three-pronged spear on its twisting form, the species has never been enslaved. It is true that in Japan the eel has been reared in captivity since the late nineteenth century, and that eel farming has been taken up on an extensive scale in the Far East and in several European countries.1 But, despite all the efforts of skilled geneticists, it has proved impossible to persuade the eel to breed in captivity. So those who would continue to enjoy its sweet, immensely nutritious flesh depend on the creature’s own capacity to renew itself.

Regrettably, those places where the eel’s exceptional calorific and culinary qualities continue to be properly esteemed do not include my own country, where, over the past half-century or so, it has disappeared from the list of dietary staples. An edition of Mrs Beeton’s cookbook of the 1930s included recipes for eel soup, jellied eel, boiled eel, stewed eel and fried eel. Twenty years later Constance Spry considered the fish worthy only to be potted into a paste. The contemporary equivalent of those two ladies, Delia Smith, has nothing to say on the subject, beyond allowing smoked eel to be ‘almost on a par with smoked salmon, in my opinion’. In general, we British no longer eat any freshwater fish, with the exception of rainbow trout, which are reared in cages and fed on pellets made from other fish and taste of the squeezings from old dishcloths. A limited domestic market for eels does survive though, kept alive by the surviving eel and pie shops in east London and the eastern suburbs, the jellied eel stalls, and a small but growing smoked eel sector.

Matters are very different in Continental Europe. To this day, the ritual of Christmas Eve in traditional Italian households includes a dish of capitone arrostito – roasted eel. The Dutch adore them smoked, and have developed a significant eel-farming industry to satisfy their appetite. The Germans love big eels, stewed or smoked. The Danes have an ancient tradition of eating them, as do the Swedes, the Finns, the Belgians and the Swiss. Several of the great restaurants of France continue to offer complex testimonials to the qualities of the eel, and it is cherished by those most fervent of fish-eaters, the Spanish and the Portuguese.

The eel may be fried, roasted, grilled, broiled, boiled, steamed, stewed, smoked, pickled. Whatever the method, the characteristics of the white flesh are its sweetness and its richness. Jane Grigson wrote: ‘I love eel …Sometimes I think it is my favourite fish. It is delicate but rich, it falls neatly from the bone.’ For Grigson, its culinary apotheosis was Monsieur Pasteau’s matelote d’anguille, which she held to be the chief reason for visiting the town of La Chartre-sur-le-Loir, the little Loir whose waters help feed the great Loire, the foremost French eel river. Another English writer, Quentin Crewe, paid his homage in the village of Passay, on the edge of the great Lac de Grand-Lieu near Nantes, where he questioned one of the last of the traditional eel fishers, Monsieur Andre Baudray, about his methods, and savoured Madame Baudray’s matelote, eel stewed for two hours in red wine, with Malaga grapes and prunes from Agen.

The eel is – of course – a finned, cold-blooded vertebrate which breathes through gills; in other words, a fish. But its habits, and, more particularly its appearance, set it apart from other fish. Its shape is against it, for – although we have learned that it is right to love, or at least tolerate, snakes – the serpentine form still taps into deep-rooted instincts of revulsion. Take into account the eel’s muted colouring, its snoutiness, its thick coat of viscous slime, and its convulsive writhings when it is removed from its element into ours, and you have a creature with a tricky image problem. Add to that its entirely false reputation as a scavenger of decomposed flesh, and a smattering of biological data – the toxicity of its blood (sufficient to kill a dog), its hermaphroditism, its unnerving capacity to continue squirming after what one callous biologist referred to as ‘skin removal, brain destruction and sectioning of the posterior nervous system’ – and you have a demon of the watery sphere.

Usually, the mere mention of its name is enough to provoke a shudder of revulsion, and the suggestion of an encounter with a living specimen is liable to bring on an attack of the vapours. Even among anglers, who cherish water and most things that live in it, its reputation is low. This prejudice is attributable partly to the eel’s looks, and partly to its habit of taking baits intended for other species, and the terrible mess that tends to ensue when it does so. The writer and poet Patrick Chalmers, a generally genial and tolerant soul, displayed this unthinking antipathy to the full when he described a tussle with an unwanted eel: ‘I offered it, with a shudder, my new bait …the eel came sinuously to it …it opened a yellow and reptilian mouth …the ghillie looked at the eel as though it was the Accuser of the Brethren …He beat it to death …he kicked the corpse into a whin bush.’

Even the greatest and wisest angler of my lifetime, the late Richard Walker, became a barbarian when dealing with eels. In his book Still-water Angling, first published in 1953, he alleges – quite baselessly – that ‘ducklings, moorhens and even cygnets are pulled under screaming’ when big eels are about. Having offered some serviceable advice on how to catch them, he deals at some length with a greater challenge – subduing them:

You have to assault the eel …the best plan is go for the brute bald-headed, armed with a newspaper, a stick and a stout knife. First, try to get the eel to roll itself up in the newspaper …this is your chance to get it a blow with the stick, either on its nose or about three inches from its tail …you can stick the knife through it just in front of the pectoral fins, aiming to sever its vertebrae; this kills it …Since eels are so inimical to every other kind of fish, and even to wildfowl, it is probably best to kill every one caught.

It is curious that a man with such tender feelings towards carp and roach should have considered any fish deserving of treatment more in keeping with a Quentin Tarantino movie than ‘the contemplative man’s recreation’. But Walker’s complete ignorance of the eel’s eating habits – and consequent brutality – were widely shared. The eel’s status as an inferior form of fish life legitimised the use of any method, the cruder and more barbaric the better. Francis Francis, the chief angling expert of the high Victorian era, recommended ‘sniggling’ for them, a technique requiring the use of a stick of ash, alder or hazel with a length of cord tied to one end. At the other end, said Francis, a ‘large darning needle’ should be ‘lashed on crossways’, with a worm threaded over it. The bait having been taken, the sniggler should wait for the fish to swallow worm and needle, then give a slight pull to turn the needle ‘across his gullet’. Thus attached, the wretched creature was ‘easily captured’. Even more amusing was the technique referred to by Francis as ‘stichering’, in which ‘an old sickle …roughly toothed’ was tied to a twelve-foot pole, and employed to levitate eels from the drains of the water meadows on the bank. ‘An unskillful sticherer,’ says Francis with lumbering humour, ‘will sometimes chop off his neighbour’s ear or poke out his eye, which doubtless lends excitement to the sport.’

As I have mentioned already, I have caught one big eel in my life. But, to be honest, I did not appreciate at the time what a thing I had done. That was more than thirty years ago, when four-pound eels – indeed eels of all sizes – were much more common than they are now. I wanted very much, in the course of researching and writing this book, to catch or at least do battle with a big eel; to have a monster eel story of my own to tell.

But big eels are like the elders of any species. They have not become big by being foolish and impetuous. They do not take a bait readily, and on the occasions they do, the tackle must be strong and the angler resourceful, to coax them into the net. The pursuit of big eels demands a considerable commitment in time. Nor is that time likely to be packed with incident. The eel specialist must be prepared to sit as still as a sleeping heron, for nights on end (for big eels are generally nocturnal feeders), beside some still, black pond, mere or canal, sustained during the vigil by inner strength and quiet passion.

There are groups dedicated to this unusual form of self-denial. I once heard the secretary of the National Anguilla Club – an organisation dedicated to studying and conserving eels, as well as angling for them – being interviewed on the radio about his calling. He had the air of a mystic about him as he talked, quietly and soberly, about his obsession and the demands it made of him; of the countless hours he had spent, watchful, unmoving, waiting for the buzz of his electric bite alarm, for the rustle of line disappearing from his reel into the blackness before him, for the upward sweep of his rod and the heavy, living resistance somewhere in the depths. He revealed, as if it were a trivial matter, that he had spent an entire season after eels without, as he put it, ‘banking a single specimen’. There was a pause while the interviewer digested this. ‘Some people, Jim [or whatever his name was], might say that you were completely mad.’ ‘Some people have indeed said that to me, Nick,’ replied the eel man in untroubled tones.

Myself, I own that I do not have that kind of dedication. Moreover, it was the thought of having caught the monster that appealed to me more than the actual catching. I was not entirely comfortable with the mental picture of myself alone, in the dark, the water at my feet lashed to a froth by a thing almost as long as me and as thick as my leg, jaws agape. So I began to modify my ambitions. I realised that a leviathan was almost certainly beyond me, and that I should be prepared to settle for eels of manageable proportions caught by any reasonably humane means. One thing I was firm about: avoiding the night. Unlike the eel, I am not a nocturnal creature, and all my experiences of fishing at night – encompassing being washed away on a Thames millstream, being stranded by the receding tide on the shores of a remote Scottish sea loch and standing on a brother’s favourite trout rod – had been unsuccessful and generally unhappy. I am at ease with dusk, as long as some pale gleam from the departing sun flickers on the surface, and I can manage the twilight that precedes dawn. But it is my strong opinion that the ‘witching time of night’ is best left to the bats and the badgers.

I was anxious to try an ancient and humane method in which worms and worsted are wound into a ball which is lowered into eel territory and raised once the prey’s teeth become properly entangled. These days its practitioners are rarely met. But Jim Milne, an old fisherman from Epney on the Severn who showed me how elvers – or baby eels – were caught, had done a good deal of it in times past, and at the mention of it his hunter’s interest perceptibly quickened. He spoke of paddling quietly across the sandbanks where the eels foraged, of the insistent nibbling at the squirming ball, of eels by the half-hundredweight, eels by the barrel. I said I would provide the worms. Jim promised the boat and the expertise. That was in April. By early September – prime time for patting, as Jim called it – wiser and more cautious counsels had prevailed in the Milne household. My suspicion was that Jim’s wife, Ruth, was more than a little reluctant to see her octogenarian husband adrift on those capricious waters with a tyro such as myself, and in such a cause.

I would have tried spearing, although it hardly belongs in the code of angling and is entirely illegal. But, as far as I could ascertain, most of the eel spears were in museums or on collectors’ walls, and the spearers in the ground. My thoughts turned to nets. One of the most effective ways of taking eels is by using a train of connected mesh funnels known as fyke nets. These strings of traps, linked by walls of netting, are not baited, but are placed at an angle to the routes taken by eels as they roam in search of food. The theory is that the eel follows its way through the funnels until it reaches the last, known as the cod end, from which there is no escape except the way it came, a manoeuvre generally beyond eelish intelligence. I had seen fyke nets in use on the Thames Estuary, and I felt that I might be able to manage them myself. The obvious place to try was Coniston, where what had been my great-aunt’s lakeside house could be rented through her family. I booked it for the following August, and plotted the attack.

I approached the Environment Agency for permission to use fyke nets. ‘This is a most unusual request,’ said the lady at the Agency’s office in Penrith. But she was helpful, and I received a lengthy document authorising me – subject to a multiplicity of conditions – to use nets for one week ‘for research purposes’. So, one brilliantly sunny late summer’s day, I went to Morecambe to borrow Dick Langley’s gear. I drove along the seafront from the north, with the unbroken line of hotels and boarding houses on one side, and the grey mud and the grey sea on the other. Holidaymakers strolled up and down the promenade, enjoying the warmth. But to me nothing, not even such a gorgeous day, could disguise the down-at-heel dinginess of this most unappealing of seaside resorts. ‘People always come back to Morecambe,’ Dick Langley said with a throaty laugh. ‘They can’t believe what they saw the first time.’

In normal circumstances, Dick makes a typically erratic fisherman’s living, catching eels, bass, codling and other species out in the bay. He has a licence to fish for elvers in the rivers running into the bay, and to take eels from various lakes and tarns. But these were not normal circumstances. Foot-and-mouth disease had swept through Lakeland. The fields were empty, the grass long and lush, the farmers out of sight. The only work was cleansing the farms, and Dick was one of those doing it, making better, regular money than the eels could ever provide. ‘Every cloud and all that,’ he commented with a tight, humourless smile. He had many friends among the farmers and shared in the tragedy that had blighted the fields and fells.2

I spent three days as a Coniston eel fisher. The weather was benign and, in the absence of wind and with the help of my brother Matthew on the oars, it was surprisingly easy to feed the stack of netting over the stern of the boat so that it lay stretched out on the bottom. I used two strings of nets, which were held in place by metal weights attached to either end. At one end there was also a buoy, a piece of white polystyrene that was reassuringly visible from our landing stage.

At first we were very excited. Matthew and I speculated gloatingly about the scale of the catch, and discussed how we would dispose of it. He is a food writer and an exceptionally accomplished cook, and I was keen for him to work his way through some of the classic eel dishes; perhaps starting with the matelote d’anguilles before progressing to something more intricate, perhaps anguille durand, eel stuffed with pike and poached in a mirepoix bordelaise. We need not have worried. The total harvest from the exertions of three days was three small eels, a host of tiny perch, and two or three miniature pike. I was bitterly disappointed. Dick Langley said he had heard dark tales of the south end of the lake being fished out by a family of rogues and poachers from Flookburgh, a few miles away. When I suggested to the lady at the Environment Agency that the dearth of eels might warrant investigation, she replied that their ‘sampling’ showed there was a healthy population, and intimated that I had been either unlucky or – more probably – inept.

Chastened, I had one hope left. I have a friend called Chris Yates, a tall, slender, bony, softly and slowly spoken, balding, impoverished father of four, who is a remarkably skilful fisherman and a remarkably talented chronicler of the joys and absurdities of the angler’s life. Chris’s speciality is catching huge carp (he used to hold the record, a mighty fish of fifty-one pounds), and he had told me that his current favourite carp lake contained something else: enormous eels. He had taken them up to four pounds while carp fishing, and there were tales, he said, of giants, of fish straightening out cod hooks in the night, of quantities so vast that they had been netted and fed to the dogs. I very much liked that touch – fed to the dogs.

Chris’s carp lake is shaped like a fat sausage, and is concealed by ancient woods of oak and beech in a valley in Wiltshire. The place is called Fonthill, a name still tinged with notoriety on account of the extraordinary follies of one of its owners of old, William Beckford (curiously enough a previous proprietor, the second Earl of Castlehaven, who was executed in 1631 after being convicted at a trial of his peers of sodomy). The lake was already here when Beckford inherited the estate and an immense (though often exaggerated) fortune on coming of age; as was a mansion built by his father on a scale so overwhelming in its lavishness that it was dubbed Splendens. Beckford disliked it and had it flattened, preferring to commission the fashionable architect of the day, James Wyatt, to build him a sham Gothic abbey with a soaring octagonal tower at its centre. Close by, he had another lake dug, so that he could view his abbey reflected in moonlight, an obligatory experience for those of extreme Romantic inclination.

Poor Beckford! Had he taken up fishing and been sent to a good school, something might have been made of him. As it was, his father died when he was young and his mother kept him at home, spoiling him grotesquely. The wayward and precocious youth developed into a wayward and precocious young man, given to wandering around Europe behaving badly. He achieved sudden fame at the age of twenty-four with the publication of his Oriental fantasy Vathek, which he is reputed to have written – in French – in three days and two nights. Subsequently, his reputation ruined by the almost certainly unfounded accusation that he had debauched an aristocratic youth, Beckford lived a generally sad and solitary life at Fonthill, shunned by his neighbours and society at large. The building of the abbey and its tower, and the shaping of the grounds to a suitably poetic echo of Paradise, took twenty years, and consumed the greater part of Beckford’s wealth. He sold Fonthill to a Scotsman, John Farquar, a gunpowder millionaire known, on account of his personal habits, as Old Filthyman. Three years later, in 1825, Wyatt’s tower fell down, and a few months later Farquar died of apoplexy. Beckford himself lived – in reduced but by no means straitened circumstances – for another twenty years, but did not revisit Fonthill.

History hangs heavy over the place, and so did the weather the day of my visit. It was mid October, late in the year for eels, but extraordinarily warm, with grey cloud pressing down on the valley, suffusing the still air with damp. They were conditions that might have been tailored for the occasion. To begin with, Chris and I fished at the shallow, northern end where, he maintained, the big eels were supposed to hunt. Apart from a certain eeliness in the air, which may have been auto-induced, we met no sign of them. Several large carp passed by, tracing spearheads on the surface, and Chris caught a handsome trout on his bunch of maggots. The shadows lengthened and deepened as dusk crept in. Chris said we should try a deep hole by the dam, an infallible spot. And, sure enough, just before half-past seven, with full darkness almost on us, I felt a chewing at my worms, struck, and felt my eel. After a brief tussle, Chris scooped his big net under the fish’s silvery belly and lifted it up. It was not large, maybe a pound or so, hardly a cause for elation. But I felt mildly relieved to have had something, and in gratitude we unhooked it and let it depart in peace.

Later, in the local pub, the Beckford Arms, I met the source of the Fonthill eel stories, the estate’s former keeper. It was true – they had fed fish from the lake to the dogs, as an alternative to rabbits. And there had been eels among them, although the great majority were perch. And it was true about the cod hooks. The keeper’s brother-in-law, who hailed from some cod-blessed seaside place, had put night-lines out, and in the morning they had been retrieved clogged with slime, with the hooks straightened out – but never an eel still on the end. The keeper himself used to spear eels from the bridge at the top end of the lake and sell them locally. But his motives appeared to have been entirely commercial, and he neither ate eels himself nor had any lively interest in them. Having waited in vain for some stirring account of monsters slain or glimpsed, wildfowl engulfed, wanderers met by night wriggling through the fields, I finished my second pint and left the pub. Outside, the night was still warm and heavy with moisture. It was a night made for eels, and I wished with a fierce, futile intensity that we had stayed by the lake and fished on into the darkness.

TWO A dainty dish

In a good season – that is to say, in times past – Brendon Sellick would catch plenty of eels. But you wouldn’t call him an eel fisherman, just a fisherman; and you would not mistake him for anything else. There cannot be many of his sort left anywhere, and in his immediate vicinity there are just him and his son, who helps him out on the mudhorse. This unusual mode of conveyance is essential to Brendon’s way of fishing. Indeed, without it there would be no fishing. And I doubt that, when he is gone – he is in his late sixties, and has been at it for more than fifty years – there will be any fishing.