An Englishman's Eel

Stuart Freedman

It may not be to everyone's taste but the humble eel has been sustaining London's poor for centuries. Today, the city's last remaining Pie & Eel shops are under threat from rising real estate prices and falling stocks of eel.~~On a chilly winter’s night in 1922, a young Danish scientist, Johannes Schmidt,~stood up at the Royal Society in London and presented his paper ‘The~Breeding Places of the Eel’.~~What would become known as ‘Schmidt’s Classical Theory’ overturned~centuries of guesswork about this most elusive and secretive of creatures.~Schmidt proved that remarkably, the freshwater European and American eel~(the Anguilla Anguilla and Rostrata) that most secretive of fish, migrated to the~far Sargasso Sea to spawn.~~The precise mechanism and exact location remains unknown to this day but~what is certain is that the smallest larvae known as Leptocephali drift~northeast of the Gulf Stream arriving in winter into Southern Europe.

They float into Northern Europe in early summer after a journey that lasts around~three years. Once in coastal waters, the larvae turn into elvers – glassy~transparent creatures that migrate inland. On maturation, the eel makes its~way back to the Sargasso to breed and to die.~~It is an extraordinary story for a creature both renown and feared in folklore~but this water-serpent that evolved more than fifty million years ago is~disappearing and that in itself is a mystery within a mystery.~**~A dark, ponderous sky full of summer rain hangs over the back yard of~Cooke’s Pie and Eel shop in Hoxton market. Surrounded and overlooked by~grim, low-rise council estates, this is the buffer zone between the East End of~Hackney and the unspeakable riches of the City of London.~Joe Cooke, a hearty, big man who swears more frequently than a docker, is~fumbling for eels in a deep plastic tank that burbles and splashes in front of~him.~~Expertly tipping the slithering prey into a bucket, he turns to sharpen a~long, wicked knife on a rasping steel. In the bucket, a reflection of the sky. A~dark, swirling mass of chaos. Six or seven eels turn over each other~desperately thrashing: trying to bury themselves. A foaming sea of slime and~muscular shiny flesh.~~Big drops of rain spot the paving stones of the yard. The eels thrash and whip~furiously. One makes it to the blood-stained chopping board and Joe’s fingers~caress it. Something strange happens. The creature is soothed: massaged –~almost hypnotised - calmed. It lays straight, delighting in itself, thinking of a~faraway sea, almost asleep, forgetful of its fate. A mercy.~~Joe’s long knife takes the off the head and expertly slits the belly removing the~guts in one long slice. Globs of dark flesh and innards fleck his thick fingers.~“I’ve been doing this since I was a kid on my Dad’s stall,” says Joe, 58.~”Beautiful creatures ain’t they?” ~~A translucent blue-black skin like an oil slick cut into jewelled pieces spotted~with rain. The sky opens and we retreat into the cosy world of pie, mash and strong~dark tea.~~Alison Debney from the Zoological Society of London is the project manager~for The Thames Eel Monitoring project. She recounts in a rather nervous, soft~voice that since 1980 there has been a decline of more than 95 per cent in the~stock levels of European eels and that in 2009 the 174-member Convention~on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITIES) started to restrict the~sale of eel due to the drastic fall.~~Click HERE to download the full text by Stuart Freedman. ~