The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

spit of land where we fished while we waited for it to be time to set up our spillers. I caught a small perch, which had swallowed the hook so badly we had to break its neck; Dad said we could try using it for bait. As the sun winked out below the horizon, a bat flew quickly and silently over our heads.

“I guess it’s time,” Dad said. I never did get that tenner, of course.

9The People Who Fish for Eel

Hanö Bay on the east coast of Skåne in Sweden is home to a unique beachfront that stretches for about thirty miles, between Stenshuvud in the south to Åhus in the north. This is what’s often called Sweden’s eel coast.

It’s a pretty landscape, but not in a pastoral or exaggerated way. There is natural beauty there, if of the somewhat inaccessible kind. Hanö Bay’s coast is gently rounded, wreathed by a sparse, windswept pine forest. A long, narrow, almost white beach, often visible from the road, lines the edge of the forest on the seaward side. It looks like a discarded, sun-bleached strip of fabric running the length of the bay. The sea is shallow and the water a deep shade of blue.

Big, thick wooden posts rise out of the sand at regular intervals, seven or eight in each small cluster. They look like telephone poles, but without wires, erected seemingly at random. These poles were used to hang up fishing equipment and nets, to dry and mend them, and wherever you see a cluster of poles sticking up at the horizon, you can be almost sure you will also find a small house. Usually an old brick or stone building, often with a thatched roof, sometimes half-buried in the dunes, almost always facing the sea. These houses are called eel sheds.

The oldest eel sheds are from the eighteenth century. There were at least a hundred along this thirty-mile stretch of coast once, and fifty or so are still standing. They are typically named after the fishermen who used them or the myths and legends said to have taken place in them. They’re called things like the Brothers’ Shed, Jeppa’s Shed, Nils’ Shed, the Hansa Shed, the Twin Shed, the King’s Shed, the Smuggler’s Shed, the Tail Shed, the Cuckoo Shed, and the Perjurer’s Shed. Some of the sheds are derelict, some have been converted into seaside summer cottages, but a handful are still used for their original purpose. It’s in these sheds you find a second category of people, quite distinct from the natural scientists, who have historically had a close relationship with the eel: eel fishermen.

Here, on the Swedish eel coast, only a few remain, and it’s a shrinking brotherhood, but their presence and profession have shaped life in this part of the world for a very long time. For centuries, eel fishing has been central to the area’s culture, traditions, and language. Here, almost everyone knows the old eel fishermen by name. Here, most have at one time or another attended an eel feast, the special late-summer or early-autumn celebrations dedicated to the eel. Here, the eel, the traditions built around it, and the knowledge about it, have become an intrinsic part of the local identity.

And it has been thus since at least the Middle Ages. Fishing along the eel coast is organized through the distribution of a special kind of fishing rights, called åldrätter. The word drätt comes from the Swedish verb for “pull” and refers to the fishing technique normally used here. It’s an ancient system, one with roots in a feudal, predemocratic time, and the only place where it survives is here, on the Swedish eel coast. The system stems from a time when Skåne was still part of Denmark; the oldest extant documentation about it dates from 1511 and tells us that a certain Jens Holgersen Ulfstand of Glimmingehus purchased two åldrätter from the archbishop. The rights were sought after, because eels were a plentiful and popular food. When Skåne became Swedish in 1658, the Swedish king appropriated the local fishing rights and redistributed them in accordance with his authoritarian Swedification policy to members of the clergy and nobility in exchange for loyalty. The owners of åldrätter could, in turn, make lucrative deals leasing those rights to fishermen and farmers. And thus, the eel has also been a tool for exercising power.

The eel feast is a leftover from those days. The Swedish word for it, gille, comes from the word gäld, meaning “debt” or “payment,” and refers to the fee a fisherman would have to pay for his fishing rights. The payment would usually be due at the end of the eel season and was made in actual eels. And thus, the eel also served as a kind of currency.

A traditional eel feast typically requires at least four different eel dishes; there are many local specialties. Fried eel, boiled eel, and eel soup. Smoked eel cleaned and soaked in brine overnight before being scalded and smoked over alder wood. So-called luad eel, which is lightly salted, put on a spit, and then baked in a hot oven, making it smoked and roasted at the same time. Halmad eel, which is a large eel cut into portion-sized pieces and fried in a hot oven in a pan filled with rye straw. Pinna eel, smaller eels salted and fried with alder sticks and juniper brush. Sailor’s eel, which is smoked eel braised in dark beer and fried in butter. Fläk eel, cleaned, deboned, oven-baked eel stuffed with dill and salt. And in this way, the eel has become the focus of a unique food culture.

The eel coast is divided into a total of 140 åldrätter. They range from five hundred to one thousand feet in width and extend a few hundred feet into the sea. Only the owner or leaser of an åldrätt can fish for eels in that particular location. The eel sheds were built adjacent to the designated åldrätt areas. They