When was the last time you ate eel? I do it, occasionally, at Japanese restaurants, where eel is known as unagi, comes warmed on a ball of rice, and covered with a dark kabeyaki sauce. I like it, but my wife can barely stand to look at it. Needless to say, it has never graced our dining table at home.
My first exposure to eels as a dish of food was in 1989, while on a family vacation to Spain. My father, Oldways founder Dun Gifford [2], was not one of those who struggled with the concept of eating eels, or much else for that matter, and had brought the family to a restaurant in Madrid that specialized in “angulas,” the Spanish dish of baby eels cooked in oil with garlic and chili peppers. I remember when that eel-filled plate hit the table in front of my father. Amidst the theatrics that followed — shouts of “gross”, throat-clutching, and fainting, my father happily picked up the little wooden fork made specifically for this particular delicacy, and dug in. He made us all try, of course, and I remember the queasy feeling as one single baby eel slid down my reluctant throat.
I was just in Spain with my own family, and was not surprised to discover that angulas are harder to find than they once were (it took a determined search to find them even at the Boqueria in Barcelona, a market known the world over for it’s variety of available foods). Eels as a species are under serious threat, and the market for them is in a considerable bubble. I spent the spring of 2012 documenting the eel harvest on the coast of Maine, where the price for a pound of baby eels can reach over $2000. (You can see the photos from that effort here: www.portergifford.com/public/eels/ [3].)
The health benefits [4] of a Mediterranean diet are well known in my house, but the recent findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine [5]decidedly confirming these benefits led me to re-evaluate my own diet. And even though I saw quickly that “oily fish” was an area that needed improvement, I think I’ll continue to keep eel off the menu for the time being. I will rely instead on a regular tuna fish sandwich, and when feeling adventurous, perhaps an anchovy.
- Porter Gifford
Links
[1] http://www.portergifford.com/contact--bio/
[2] https://oldwayspt.org/about-us/founder-history
[3] http://www.portergifford.com/public/eels/
[4] https://oldwayspt.org/resources/health-studies?tid_1=1320&tid=All
[5] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1200303