The Book of Eels

Brendon’s cottage, and the ramshackle shed from which he sells his catch, are set back a little way from a defensive barrier raised in 1939 to discourage any German landfall at Bridgwater Bay in Somerset. On the map, the bay is a bulge of blue on the southern side of the Severn Estuary. A mile or two to the east of Brendon’s place, it is fed by two lethargic channels leading from the damp and reedy flatland of Sedgemoor, the rivers Parret and Brue. Beyond is the once fashionable resort of Burnham on Sea, where pleasure-seekers took to the waters – and may do so still – even though the bluest of skies is needed to disguise their brown colour. The mighty tides that sweep up and down the estuary dictate a ceaseless, shifting balance of power between the sea and the banks of sludge and silt laid there over the ages by the rivers of the marshes. When the tide is out, the water is reduced to a channel so distant that it appears in danger of being obliterated altogether. Mud is in the ascendant, a sticky, glistening, quaking, grey expanse, streaked with lines of greasy, soapy rocks. It is a world of its own, requiring special techniques from its residents and visitors. The wading birds do nicely, and so does Brendon on his mudhorse.

Although he is a fisherman, he has no boat. His nets are fixed in the mud, strung out along lines of blackened stakes arranged at angles across the routes favoured by the fish as they move in to forage with the rising tide. At the height of the tide, when the bay is filled, the nets are invisible. As it recedes, the stakes appear like watery sentinels, until it is time for the mudhorse. Some of the nets can be reached on foot, but others – generally the most productive – cannot. So Brendon lies face down on the mudhorse – a low wooden platform on runners, resembling a toboggan – and with his hands and feet propels himself across the flats, plucking the catch as he goes.

There are eels, flounder, dabs, whiting, a multitude of shrimps, the occasional bass, the very occasional salmon. It is an extraordinarily simple, not to say primitive, way of fishing, no different in its essentials from that carried out along this coast for centuries (remains of medieval fixed nets have been found at Minehead, not far away). It is the kind of fishing that has absolutely no place in the modern world; its ‘inefficiency’ providing enough for the fisherman’s own needs and a modest surplus to sell or barter, and no more. Brendon Sellick does it because, in the world he was born into, you did what your father did, unless compelling circumstances intervened – and his father was a mudhorse man. But times had changed, as he explained to me in his piping burr. The nature of the revolution was, for him, illustrated by his last holiday – a three-week cruise with his wife to Egypt, Israel and the Greek islands. ‘Dad wouldn’t have believed it,’ he said, hardly seeming to believe it himself. The idea that the son of a Sellick who had cruised the Greek islands would be content to eke out a living gliding over the mud of Bridgwater Bay on his belly, extricating flapping fish from nylon netting, was clearly absurd.

To my disappointment, I did not see the mudhorse out of its stable. When I visited Brendon, the tides were too small to expose the more distant nets. So I followed him on foot, in waders. To our left, half a mile away, was the huge, squat, concrete mass of Hinckley Point nuclear power station, with the low line of the Quantock Hills behind. Every so often the screech of the gulls was drowned out by the roar of steam being released from one of the massive chimneys. Brendon told me that before Mrs Thatcher’s time, someone had had the idea of utilising the warm water from the power station for an experimental eel farm. A million pounds was invested, and the eels did very well, growing large and – according to Brendon – slightly blue. They were taken off by tanker to Germany, until the order came from on high – Brendon thought from Mrs Thatcher herself – that Hinckley Point was to be sold off, which meant no more money was to be frittered away on fattening blue eels for Germans. ‘I liked her,’ Brendon mused. ‘She turned the country round, you know. But that was a shame about the eels.’

We sloshed along the accessible nets. In the last, their beaky little heads stuck through the mesh, were two smallish eels, the only ones. ‘It’s been a terrible year for them,’ Brendon lamented. ‘Terrible. I don’t know why, haven’t a clue. Not enough eels, I suppose.’ We talked about the migration. ‘And they say it comes all the way from – what do they call it? – the Sargasso, and then all the way back again. Amazing, innit?’ I wondered if he believed ‘them’. He told me that one day before the war, his father had caught a sturgeon in the nets weighing nearly a hundred pounds. ‘Seven foot long it were. Amazing. No, I’ve never seen another one.’

Back in his shed he filleted a cod for me, and packed up a bag of juicy, freckly shrimps. Chickens wandered through the clutter of nets, dilapidated lobster pots, perished rubber boots and plastic bags, helping themselves to fragments of shrimp scattered on the floor. Brendon thought he would have the eels himself, stewed then left to cool so a jelly formed around the chunks. ‘I likes ‘em,’ he said with relish. ‘Mind, there’s not many does.’3

When Brendon has eels in any quantity he sells them to Michael Brown, a former journalist, long-distance walker and elver fisherman now turned eel smoker. This is the eel in a socially acceptable form, with head, slimy skin and awkward bones removed: a moist, rich, flavoursome and manageable fillet, made more delicious still with a dab of sauce made from the horseradish growing in the fields around. Brown’s smokery is housed in an outbuilding on a farm deep in the Somerset Levels, a mile or two from the ruins of noble Muchelney Abbey, where a millennium ago the monks received six thousand eels a year from their fisheries. Next to it is a little restaurant where you may eat eel warm from the smokery, with boiled potatoes. A fyke net is strung from the ceiling, and on the wall is a testament from one Ernie Woods to the huge eels of Chard Reservoir, which ‘barked like dogs’.4

Another of Michael Brown’s suppliers – as unlike Brendon Sellick as a bass is a flounder – is a former teacher at Christchurch Grammar School in Dorset, Roger Castle. Whereas Sellick is no more than vaguely curious about eels and enjoys telling tales about their unaccountable habits, Castle has long been gripped by the strange architecture of their life cycle, and has carried out a long, unfinished investigation into it. He was born in Poole and as a boy lived on a boat in Poole Harbour, a prosaic name for a considerable inland sea now encircled in the clasp of suburban sprawl, but still – with its creeks, channels, islands and mudbanks endlessly swept by the restless incoming and outgoing of the sea – a wild and lonely place demanding respect, even from those who know it well.

Castle took a degree in physical education and biology at Loughborough University and wrote a learned paper called ‘The Life History of the European Eel’ for his general science course. Aside from a scholarly reworking of the standard accounts of the eel’s life cycle and migrations, it contains an interesting account of the eels of Poole Harbour which – back in the 1950s – were present in enormous abundance (Castle talks of being able, on warm summer evenings, ‘to catch the fish as fast as you can get a line to them’). He deduced that the harbour eels comprised a resident saltwater population, sustained at a high density by an inexhaustible supply of small crabs, shrimps and prawns, and worms.

In the 1970s the buoyant price for adult eel stimulated a concerted assault by local fishermen on the Poole eels. Roger Castle became involved, although he encountered fierce animosity from the locals when they could spare the time from hauling in the eels. The fishing was completely uncontrolled, and after a few years catches plummeted. Somewhat bruised by his experiences, Castle sought more peaceful pastures. He began fishing the two rivers that debouch into the harbour at Christchurch, the Avon and the Stour. These are like two cousins from branches of a family very much divided in their fortunes: the Avon much the more refined, draining much of Wiltshire and flowing in a stately fashion through Hampshire, once – though no more – one of England’s premier salmon rivers; the Stour slow and sluggish, murky and reedy, ambling its way through the eastern part of Dorset, never much of a river for salmon and now without them altogether, but renowned for its pike and perch. Both rivers were good hunting grounds for the eel, and using fyke nets through the summer, shifting from one location to another (for they soon become alert to the predator in their midst), Castle was able to satisfy his yearning for involvement with eels and to contrive for himself a useful income. In the early 1990s he persuaded the Bournemouth and West Hants Water Company to let him install an eel trap, or rack, at Longham on the Stour. He was thus able to extend his season into late autumn by catching the cream of the harvest, the silver eel.

When not in use, Castle’s eel rack – which resembles a giant fire grate – is tucked up underneath a brick outhouse built over part of the river’s flow. On those moonless autumn nights when the eels are wont to run, it is lowered into position, and the sluice gate upstream adjusted to increase the volume of water through it. It is a most ingenious and impressive apparatus, even though on the night I inspected it, only one eel came in. Nor was Castle much more successful with the fyke nets he had set on the Avon a couple of miles away. It was late in the year, and he suspected that the unusually high water levels of the previous weeks had sent the silvers on their way when he was unable to work his trap. Either that, or – for their inscrutable reasons – they were waiting.

He was filled with gloom about the creature’s prospects. Over the past ten years he had experienced a steady decline in catches – noticeable on the Avon, steep on the Stour. Castle believed the spread of toxic silt beds had fouled the mouth of the Stour, persuading the incoming elvers either to choose the cleaner, more alkaline flow of the Avon, or to stay in the estuary.

Roger Castle is the only eel fisherman on the Stour and Avon. He is proud of that singularity, and of the knowledge and understanding of this most enigmatic of fish which he has accumulated as a professional fisherman. As a consequence he is apt to be impatient with those – the fishery officers of the Environment Agency – who issue his licences, restrict his freedom to operate, and question his experience. More than that, he is fearful for his eels; fearful that, having been the only eel fisherman, he will be the last – not because it is a tough and demanding occupation, although it is, but because there will be no eels left.5

As with so much else, it was the Greeks who first found the words to sing the praises of the eel. The curiosity of their intellectuals – most notably Aristotle – about the creature’s life cycle clearly reflected an established epicurean enthusiasm. In Aristophanes’ The Archanians, the hero Dicaeopolis, upon learning that a smuggler has secured for him fifty of the succulent eels of Lake Copais, bursts forth: ‘O my sweetest, my long-awaited desire.’ In another of his plays, a sausage seller shouts: ‘Yes, it is with you as with the eel-catchers; when the lake is still they do not take anything, but if they stir up the mud, they do; so it is with you when you disturb the state.’

In about 330 BC, a Sicilian Greek known as Archestratus wrote a popular satire on the hedonism of the age called The Life of Luxury, in which he referred to the eel as ‘the undisputed master of the fishmonger’s stall’ and noted that ‘the eels of the Strymon River and Lake Copais have a formidable reputation for excellence thanks to their large size and wondrous girth’. Archestratus essayed a feeble joke about eels being more valuable than gods – ‘since prayer is free and at least a dozen drachmas is required to secure an eel’ – before paying this tribute: ‘All in all, I think the eel rules over everything at the feast and commands the field of pleasure, despite being the only fish with no backbone’ (another translation has this as ‘no scrotum’ – my ancient Greek is inadequate to resolve the matter).

Another shadowy figure from those distant days, Agathar-chides of Knidos, alleged that the Boeotians held the fat eels of Lake Copais in such reverence that they turned them into demi-gods, putting crowns on them and offering prayers. According to Alexandre Dumas’s Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, ‘the Egyptians placed eels on a par with the gods …they raised them in aquariums, whose priests were charged with feeding them with cheese and entrails.’ (An American anthropologist, Albert Herre, who worked in the Philippines in the 1920s, found a ‘well-developed’ eel cult among the Lepanti Igorots who lived near Mount Mougoa. They kept sacred eels in pools, which were fed daily on rice and sweet potatoes by devotees who sang songs of praise as they went about their work.)

All the peoples of the ancient world ate eels, with the exception of the Jews, who were forbidden on the erroneous grounds that it was of the company ‘that hath not scales …and shall be an abomination’. The place of the eel in Roman affections was savagely mocked by Juvenal, who alleged – most unfairly – that they fed on sewage:

Now comes the dish for thy repast decreed A snake-like eel of that unwholesome breed Which fattens where Cloaca’s torrents pour And sports in Tiber’s flood, his native shore.

According to the legendary Roman epicure, Marcus Gavius Apicius, six thousand eels were served at various feasts marking the triumphs of Julius Caesar. They were supplied by Gaius Hirrius, whose fishponds were so famously productive that – mainly on account of them – he was able to sell his estates for the fabulous sum of four million sesterces. (Of Apicius and his gluttonous excesses, Chambers Biographical Dictionary records: ‘It is said that when he had spent £800,000 upon his appetite and had only some £80,000 left, he poisoned himself to avoid the misery of plain diet.’ Being informed that the prawns of Libya were even larger and more luscious than those available in his native Campania, Apicius is said to have sailed straight away for Tripoli; and on discovering that the report was false and the prawns were no better, to have sailed home again.)

‘It is agreed by most men,’ wrote Izaak Walton in the first edition of The Compleat Angler, published in 1653, ‘that the Eel is a most dainty dish. The Romans have esteemed her the Helena of their feasts, and some the queen of palate pleasure.’ Walton cautioned against overdoing it, quoting Solomon: ‘Eat no more than is sufficient, lest thou surfeit.’

But flesh of such richness and flavour can be difficult to resist. The pre-eminent Irish eel expert, Christopher Moriarty, speculated that Henry I of England, who, according to the account of the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, died from eating lampreys ‘contrary to the instructions of his physician’, might in fact, given a general confusion between the two species, have been gorging on eels.

One who certainly succumbed to an extravagant anguillo-philia was the wretched Simon de Brie of Tours, the puppet Pope Martin IV installed by Charles of Anjou in 1281. He did not last long, dying four years later – much to his patron’s inconvenience – from an excess of Lake Bolsena eels, which he favoured stewed in Vernaccia wine. One of Simon’s epitaphs viewed his fate from the celebratory perspective of his prey: ‘Gaudent anguillae, quia mortuis hic jacet ille qui quali morte excoriabit eas.’ His punishment was to be dispatched to Purgatory, where Dante spotted him:

…e quella faccia

di la da lui, piu che l’altre trapunta,

ebbe la santa Chiesa in le sue braccia:

dal Torso fu, e purga per digiuno

I’anguille di Bolsena e la vernaccia

( …and that visage

beyond him, more shrivelled than the others,

held the Holy

Church within its arms; from Tours sprang he

and by fasting purges

the eels of Bolsena and the sweet wine).

Another possessed of a fierce and notorious passion for eel flesh was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Having spent thirty years vying with the King of France, Francis I, as to who should be master of Europe, Charles famously abdicated and retired to the monastery of Yuste in the Spanish province of Estramadura, where he kept a close eye on his son and successor, Philip II, and was tormented by gout and gluttonous yearnings. The great American historian of Spain, William Hickling Prescott, wrote of Charles:

In the almost daily correspondence [with the Secretary of State] there is scarcely one letter which does not turn on the Emperor’s eating or his illness. It must have been no easy matter for the secretary to preserve his gravity in the perusal of dispatches in which politics and gastronomy were so strangely mixed together. Fish of every kind was to his taste, as indeed was anything that in its nature or habits approached to fish. Eels, frogs, oysters occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare. Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great favour with him. On an eel-pasty he particularly doted.

How the world-weary, gouty Emperor would have relished an eel dinner with Izaak Walton, whose favourite recipe – presented with lip-smacking relish – makes something of a nonsense of his call for self-restraint:

First wash him in water and salt; then pull off his skin below his vent or navel, and not much further: having done that, take out his guts as clean as you can, but wash him not: then give him three or four scotches with a knife; and then put into his belly and those scotches sweet herbs, an anchovy and a little nutmeg grated or cut very small and mixed with good butter and salt; having done this, then pull his skin over him all but his head, which you are to cut off, to the end that you may tie his skin above that part where his head grew, and it must be so tied as to keep all his moisture within his skin: and having done this, tie him with tape or packthread to a spit and roast him leisurely, and baste him with water and salt till his skin breaks and then with butter: and having roasted him enough let what was put in his belly, and what he drips, be his sauce.

One of the chief attractions of the eel was that, in an age when most fish and meat was of necessity preserved in salt, it was readily obtainable fresh, if not actually alive. When Henry III celebrated St Edward’s Day in October 1257, it is said that fifteen thousand eels were provided for the feast. On a more modest scale, when Bishop Hales of Coventry and Lichfield called his sixty guests to the table for the Feast of the Assumption on 15 August 1461, they were served with two salmon, two chub (a dubious choice – Walton called the flesh ‘not firm but short and tasteless’), three pike, four perch, half a dozen dace and trout, and two dozen each of grayling and eels.

Although Walton’s recipe was ornate and clearly intended for special occasions, the abundance of eels, the length of their season, the ease with which they could be kept alive for lengthy periods, and their range of distribution, made them a dietary staple – at least for the English and much of Continental Europe. Londoners, famously, took them to their hearts, inventing the eel pie and jellying in their honour. Perhaps surprisingly, eighty or so eel and pie shops still do business in the East End and outlying districts6 – although these days the contribution to turnover from the old cockney favourite, stewed eel and ‘liquor’ (green parsley sauce), is pretty negligible. Some of the families involved in the trade – the Cookes, the Kellys, the Manzes – go back to Victorian times, when eel was cheap and plentiful. The Reverend David Badham, a Victorian curate and authority on mushrooms, insects and fish, described the thriving trade in his book Ancient and Modern Fish Tattle:

London …steams and teems with eels alive and stewed; turn where you will and ‘hot eels’ are everywhere smoking away, with many a fragrant condiment at hand to make what is itself palatable yet more savoury …For one halfpenny a man of the million may fill his stomach with six or seven long pieces and wash them down with a sip of the glutinous liquid they are stewed in.

The affinity between the capital and eels went back many centuries. Shakespeare’s Fool invokes it as he chatters to Lear: ‘Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put them in the paste alive; she rapped them o’ the coxcombs with a stick and cried “down, wantons, down”.’ At about the same time that assiduous recycler of other men’s work, Gervase Markham (‘a base fellow’, Ben Jonson called him), included a recipe for eel pie in his brantub of domestic counsel, The English Hus-Wife, advising that it be cut up, combined with ‘great Raisons’ and onions, and placed in a coffin or pie dish. By the time Dr William Kitchiner published his Apicius Redivivus, or The Cook’s Oracle, in the early 1800s, the ingredients had multiplied to include parsley, sherry, shallots and lemon, all to be hidden beneath a dome of golden pastry. ‘It is a great question debated for ages on Richmond Hill,’ Dr Kitchiner reported, ‘whether the pie is best hot or cold. It is perfect either way.’

The only European city to rival London in its love of eels was Naples. Mr Badham included this description of the Neapolitan fish market on Christmas Eve:

The dispersals of this delicacy occupy either side of the Toledo from end to end and there display the curling, twisting snake-like forms of their slippery merchandise. Some, suspended over the booths, wriggle around the poles to which they are attached; others, half-flayed to demonstrate the whiteness of their flesh, undulate their slimy coils by thousands in large, open hampers …Others are fizzing and spluttering in the midst of hot grease in huge frying pans. Every man, woman and child carries home eels for breakfast, dinner, supper. Every Scotchman who chanced to find himself in the midst of such a scene will learn to hate and recoil from a Church which sanctions such an abomination as food.

The French, too, revered their eels. A cookery book of the seventeenth century, Le Cuisinier François, gives a bewildering array of recipes, including eel stuffed with whiting and mushrooms and braised in brandy and white wine, eel served with fish veloutée and crayfish coulis, and eel sliced and larded with anchovy fillets. The most illustrious of all French gastronomes, Jean-Antoine Brillat-Savarin, included a charming eel story in his best-known work, The Philosopher in the Kitchen. A horse dealer named Briguet, having made a decent fortune in Paris, returned to his home village of Talissieu, in the Ghambéry region, where he married a woman previously employed as a cook to the notorious Mademoiselle Cheverin, ‘once known to all Paris as the Ace of Spades’. It was the custom in the diocese that included Talissieu for the parish priests to dine together once a month to discuss ecclesiastical matters. When it was the turn of the cure of Talissieu to host the dinner, he – having been presented by a parishioner with a three-foot eel ‘taken from the limpid waters of the Seran’ – asked Madame Briguet to work her culinary magic with the fish. She gladly agreed, confiding that she had a little box containing ‘certain condiments’ given to her by her former mistress, the Ace of Spades. The dish was prepared, the guests sat down. ‘It looked magnificent and smelt delicious. Words could not be found to express its praise. It disappeared, body and sauce, down to the last particle.’

As the evening wore on the proceedings became increasingly convivial. ‘The reverend men were stirred in an unaccustomed manner. Their conversation took a ribald turn …and was entirely given to the sweetest of the deadly sins.’ Next morning they were all thoroughly ashamed of themselves, and blamed Madame Briguet’s eel for their loose tongues. ‘I have inquired in vain after the nature of the condiment,’ Brillat-Savarin concluded. ‘The artist herself pleaded guilty to serving a highly spiced crayfish sauce, but I am convinced she was not telling me everything.’