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

than five companies that catch and sell glass eels. Here, too, professional knowledge is ancient and inherited. The glass eels come in on the tide on cold nights, under a full or crescent moon and preferably when the sky is slightly overcast. They float near the surface in massive shoals, like enormous, silvery tangles of seaweed; the fishermen glide slowly back and forth in their boats; the light from the lanterns at their prows is reflected in the living blanket of fish. They lift the glass eels out by hand, with round nets attached to long rods.

The glass eel is considered a delicacy in the Basque Country, and only there these days. The tradition of consuming the eel in this frail, transparent state has, however, historically been widespread. In the United Kingdom, glass eels were once caught in the Severn. They were fried whole while still alive together with a bit of bacon, or with a beaten egg in a kind of omelet, a so-called elver cake. In Italy, glass eels used to be caught in the Arno River in the west and around Comacchio in the east. There the preferred way of serving them was boiled in tomato sauce with a sprinkle of parmesan. Eating glass eels was also popular in some parts of France. These days, however, it’s a dying tradition. As the number of glass eels wandering up Europe’s rivers has plummeted, the fishing industry built around them has also ceased to exist. It’s really only the Basques who stubbornly refuse to give up.

There are, of course, rational reasons for this. First on the list are financial concerns. Glass eels have been fished here for a long time. It’s said they used to drift up the Oria in such great quantities that farmers would catch them from the banks by the netful and feed them to their pigs. But it’s their scarcity, the increased threat to their existence, that has ultimately made the glass eel a more sought-after and exclusive delicacy, in a twist of logic that is unique to humankind. In the Basque Country it’s eaten fried in the finest olive oil with a hint of garlic and mild chili. It’s served burning hot in a small ceramic dish; diners eat it with a special wooden fork to avoid burning their lips. In peak season, a small portion, 250 grams, can cost sixty or seventy dollars in the finer eateries in San Sebastián.

But the eel fishermen in Aguinaga and along the Oria have other reasons to continue with their trade. They simply don’t want to stop. Because they feel it’s their right. Because this was precisely what their ancestors did before them and because this particular way of fishing for eel is, aside from a way to earn a living, what makes them who they are. The region is also a stronghold of the Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna. People here are used to being self-reliant. For forty years they were marginalized and oppressed under the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, so they remain vigilant against power grabs by bureaucrats in Madrid or Brussels. Here, the fishermen will return to the river with their nets and lanterns no matter what politicians and scientific experts have to say about it. Until the very last eel fisherman is gone. Or the very last eel.

AROUND LOUGH NEAGH IN NORTHERN IRELAND, LOCALS HAVE fished for eels for at least two thousand years; the eels caught there are often described as Europe’s finest. Lough Neagh is found at the northeast corner of Ireland. It is the largest lake in the British Isles, located west of the Mourne Mountains in a fairly barren landscape; for large parts of the year, it is characterized by a rather unforgiving climate, prone to severe storms. Yet even so, the fishing here continues much as it always has. Because that is what each successive generation has been taught to do. Because neither the location nor the eel has allowed any variation.

In Lough Neagh, the catch is primarily yellow eel, and the tool used is a spiller. Long lines with multiple hooks baited with worms are set from simple boats. Two fishermen per boat will set four spillers with four hundred hooks on each every day during peak season. Sixteen hundred hooks that need to be baited by hand and checked at the crack of dawn when the cold and fog turn fingers into stiff glass rods.

Traditionally, the catch has been shipped to London. Eel was for a long time a popular food in the capital, sold in little shops and market stands. It was eaten fried with mash, or as jellied eel, sliced rounds of eel boiled in a stock that sets into jelly. It was considered good-value-for-the-money everyday fare, and was intimately associated with the working class of the East End. The eel was fatty and rich in proteins and significantly cheaper than meat, which is why it was sought after by the poor and predictably often despised by the wealthy.

But Londoners’ fondness for eel was not the only reason Lough Neagh eels ended up in London. There were political reasons as well. When the British colonized large parts of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they confiscated not only the most fertile land but also valuable natural resources. In 1605, the Irish locals around Lough Neagh were forced to give up their fishing rights, and for more than three hundred and fifty years, the fishing was controlled by the English colonizers. Wealthy Protestants decided how many eels were to be caught, what was to be done with them, and how much fishermen would be paid for them. The fishermen, often Catholic farmers forced from their land, obliged to find other ways of making a living, were poor and powerless. The eel was an emergency solution to stay alive.

For several hundred years, all fishing rights were in the possession of the Earl of Shaftesbury, but in the mid-twentieth century, they were sold to a