Smoked Eel - the ultimate luxury food

Sadly, eel is one of those foodstuffs that people pull a face at, saying "Oh, eeeeel... I couldn't!". It sits alongside offal in registering disgust from those who haven't tried it. If your one experience of eel is the famous London jellied variety, I say think again.
Jellied eels are too often bony, bland and slimy.

Once smoked, however, eel is a real thing of beauty. It's that luscious combination of oily fish and oak smoke - think of smoked salmon or trout - even mackrel - after the smoker, the fish takes on a texture of silk and fills the mouth with a feeling of luxury.

Smoked eel might seem expensive (I recently bought 100g for £4.95) but you don't need much - 100g should be enough for two reasonably generous portions.
You can get smoked eel from a number of places - my local fishmongers smoke their own (Jarvis Fish, Norbiton) and I've also bought it from Brown & Forrest of Somerset (who have a stall at Borough Market on Saturdays or you can buy from their website).

For my money, smoked eel rates higher than smoked salmon (actually, I'd put a good smoked trout in between the two).

What to do with it:
Last time I had smoked eel, we took the recipe straight out of Alistair Little's Soho Cooking (a great book full of entertaining anecdotes and great recipes). This recipe called for fillets of smoked eel with a salad of bitter curly endive and crispy bacon dressed with a horseradish dressing.
Though the ingredients here are few, they all balance perfectly - the crisp, hot and salty bacon compliments the smooth oiliness of the eel, the bitter endive balances the sweetness of the fish and the horseradish dressing cuts through it all beautifully.

Next up... I'm going to try Fergus Henderson's (St John's Restaurant) smoked eel with crispy bacon and mashed potato - sounds like perfect luxury comfort food to me!

The health bit:
Eel is a very good source of those essential Omega 3 fatty acids - containing around 5grammes per 100grammes. However, it is also rich in vitamin A - making it unsuitable for women in the early stages of pregnancy or trying to conceive.

The interesting nature bit:
While eels can be raised in fish farms, they do not breed there. Instead, eels breed in the deep Sargasso Sea (off Florida) - the larve then float on the currents to European waters. As elvers (young eels up to 7cm - a treat I have not yet tried), they migrate to fresh water to grow and change colour (to yellow).
As mature adults (10 years), they change colour again to 'silver' (actually black with lighter underbodies) and migrate back to the sea to breed again...

The bad news:
So it seems with so many of life's luxuries - eels are becoming rarer. According to Brown & Forrest, 2005 was the worst elver harvest in living memory. Elvers were priced at £400 per kilo - making it too expensive for Brown & Forrest to restock their farmed streams. Bad news indeed.
I don't know why things are so bad - but we could take a guess - global warming maybe? We know the ocean temperature off Florida is high this year - ask the people of New Orleans...

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