p 20 Talking to a fisherman near Hinckley Point

“He told me one day before the war, his father had caught a sturgeon in the nets weighing nearly a hundred pounds. “Seven foot long it were. Amazing. No. I’ve never seen another one.”

p. 24 An American anthropologist, Albert Herre, who worked in the Philippines in the 1920s, found a ‘well-developed’ eel cult among the Lepanti Igorots who lived near Mount Mougoa. They kept sacred eels in pols, which were fed daily on rice and sweet potatoes by devotees who sang songs of praise as they went about their work.”

p. 35 A Roman of Praeneste, Claudius Aelianus, who in the second century AD, complied a collection of contemporary curiosities entitled De Natura Animalium. .. his book also contains reference to fly fishing for trout, as practiced by the Macedonians, which subsequent investigation has shown to be – almost certainly – authentic and reliable.”

p. 40 “The first great English antiquary, John Leland, referred to Lanport market in Segdemoor being full of “peckles, as they call them, because they take them in those waters by pecking an eel speare in them when they lie in their beds”… Eel spears were still being made in the small Danish town of Skyum until 30 years ago, and Dr Christopher Moriarty records how commercial eel spearing contniued on the mudflats at Rosslare, in south-east Ireland, until the 1960s, when tidal changes refulted in the eel grounds being buried in sand.”

p. 56 “the eel is an ancient creature and a primitve one. But its primitiveness does not mean that it is simply made, only that it was perfectly made in the earliest times. In fact its sensory equipment is so complex as to defy analysis, even now. Scientists who have spent lifetimes dissecting eels and studying their habits sill do not have any clear idea how – for example – they find their way across the vast expanses of the ocean to their breeding grounds. The Irish pote, Seamus Heaney, was stirred by the mystery. In “The Return”, he wrote

Who knows if she knows

her depth and direction;

She’s passed Malin and

Tory, silent, wakeless,

A wisp, a wick, that is

Its own taper and light

Through the weltering dark.”

p. 111 “The quiet life they have pursued this past 10 or 15 years is coming to an end. THey are preparing for a journey, to fulfil their destiny. Their backs and flanks darken from greenish to near black, while their bellies turn from yellow to silver. They become firmer to the touch, as fat is stored in their body muscle. Their nostrils dilate and their eyes expand. They cease to eat, and their digestive tracts degenerate. The salt content in the blood diminishes. The sex organs, which run like ribbons through the bodies of males and females, swell.” The order to move is generally sensed at night, and the external circumstances that stimulate have been known for thousands of years and exploited to mankind’s dietary advantage. The night is dark and stormy, and the barometric pressure is low. The moon is in its last squarter, small and growing smaller. The river is high, swollen by rain, and the current is strong. The wind blows from the lake into the mouth of the river leading to the sea, the stronger the better. Although there will be a trickle of migrating eels at any time, in any conditions, between August and the end of the year, it is this concert of effects which triggers the sudden and overwhelming collective impulse to depart, the mass exodus…. The records of the Comacchio fishery relate that on the night of 4 October 1697, the fishermen took 322,520kg of eel – around 300 tons, perhaps three quarters of a million fish, in one night’s work… these mighty harvests belong to the distant past.”

p. 114 Its skin is able, when moist, to absorb up to 90% of its oxygen requirement. The skin also plays a vital part in permitting the fish to pass without distress from freshwater to saltwater. … the thickness of the skin and the mucus with which it is so lavishly coated make it unusually resistant to the process known as osmosis”.

p. 127 “On the Thames the elver run was known as the eel fare. It usually began towards the end of April and was the occasion for Londoners to arm themselves with sieves and nets, take off their shoes, roll up their trousers, and help themselves. In 1832 Dr William Roots of Kingston upon Thames kept watch on a column close to the bank. It proceeded continuuously for five days, and he calculated that up to 1800 elvers were passing each minute.”

p. 132 “there is no evidence to support the charge – endlessly repeated by ignorant proprietors of trout and salmon fisheries, their keepers and some anglers – that they are destructive predators of salmon and trout eggs. These fish generally spawn during the winter and early spring, when eels are buried in mud, motionless and fasting, their metabolism merely yicking over… eels eat when they need to, and they are frequently caught with entirely empty stomachs, which – considering it takes them up to three days to digest a meal – suggests an abstemious attitude to the pleasures of the table.”

p. 157 In 1908 a delegation of fishmongers and fishery owners from Hamburg arrived in Gloucester. They had heard of the extraordinary scale of the Severn elver run, and wished to obtain supplies with which to supplement the stocks in German rivers and lakes which were insufficient to meet demand for eel. They were given permission to establish a depot at Epney, behind the Anchor Inn, from where the babies were shipped live back to Hamburg. It was an unusual trading link, but evidently a profitable one, for the depot was still flourishing in 1939, when the Ministry of Agriculture took possession of it and sent the Germans back home”

p. 170 a splendid print datying back from around 1800, called Eel Bobbing at Battersea. An old woman is sitting in a boat held in position a yard or two from the bank of the Thames by a pole driven into the mud. Beyond her, on the far side, standing out againsy a pale coral sky, rise the spire of a church and a windmill. She has a pipe jammed into her mouth, a round hat on her head, a blanket over her knees, a barrel in the sterm. She is grasping a sturdy piece of tumber in her honry hands, from the end of which, descending into the calm, oily water is a line. Somewhere beneath is the ball of worsted and worms, and once she feels teeth in it, up it will come, and there will be pie for supper, or perhaps eel in jelly”

p. 175 “the supply of live eels to the one great central fish market – at Billingsgate in London – was already largely controlled by the Dutch well before 1412, when the Lord Mayor decreed they should be sold by weight only. The vessels used for transporting and storing them were known as schuyts. Bulging with their perforated eel prisons, they became a familiar sight in London, as the companies owning them had been granted the right to anchor off Billingsgate for ease of access. In the late 17th century the official concession to supply eels to the market was bestowed by royal decree, partly in acknowledgement of the part played by the masters and crew of the schuyts in fighting the Great Fire of 1666 and providing food and shelter for the homeless victims. The main condition of the concession was that there should be at least one shop filled with eels in position at all times”

p. 268 “almost all the figures point to steep and continuing reductions in stock levels, and the eel watchers are of pretty much one mind. Some judge the decline to be critical, others prefer ‘significant’ or #dramatic#…no one knows what impact eel fishing is having, because no one knows how many eele there are and how many are being caught. Anyway, the effect of fishing is but one of the factors determining population dynamics. Others include the creeping advance on both sides of the Atlantic of the parasitic nematode Anguillicola crassus, which destroys the fish’s swimbladder, the spread of a herpes virus which attacks blood-forming tiss,e contaminations by PCBs and other pollutants, and the loss of habitat due to the draining of wetlands and the construction of dams… the Sargossa Sea itself has been given a generally clean bill of health .. but there is deep concern about a transport system that delivers the baby eels to the shores of Europe and North America, and the deepending suspicioun that the great alliance between the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current may be faltering… the warming of the Arctic Ocean might be eroding the vigour”

p. 109 William Cobbett’s “reports of his Rural Rides started to appear in 1821, in the pages of his journal, the Political register… rode with the eyes of a yeoman farmer, constantly appraising the capabilities of the land he was passing through. He appreciated well-grown crops, well-tended orchards, properly managed flocks. He was fantastically energetic, endlessly curious, splenetic, endearing in his lack of self-doubt… If only farmers would do things his way, sow more swedes, and sow that seed in drills rather than broadcast, then agriculture in Britain might yet be saved. ‘Cobbett’s Quackeries’, his enemies called these obsessions – for American corn (the maize that is now widely grown by farmers for cattle doffer), for robina as a fast-growing fuel, for straw plaiting as a way of providing an income for countrywomen. Why should Leghorn bonnets make Italy rich, when plaiting straw for the bonnets could equally well be done here in England?”

p. 111 “It was because of this sympathy with the labourer (the Political Register had a circulation of c. 60,000, mostly among working men) that Cobbett always felt happiest in relatively sheltered, well-wooded country. He felt no connection with the high, open landscape of the Cotswolds.. going towards Cirencester in October 1821, he noted fields ‘fenced with stone, laid together in walls without mortar or earth … There is very little wood here. The labourers seem miserably poor….in the high chalk lands round Salisbury, where fuel had to be bought, he remembered the miserable sight of the poor taking turns to make a fire so that four or five kettles could be boiled on the one flame. ‘What a winter life must those lead, whose turn it is not to make the fire.’”

p. 112 “The kind of landscape he responds to manifests itself in Mr Sloper’s farm at West Woody in Hampshire: ‘large tracts of turnips; clean land; stubbles ploughed up early; ploughing with oxen; and a very large and singularly fine flock of sheep. Everything that you see, land, stock, implements, fences, buildings; all do credit to the owner; bespeak his sound judgement, his industry, and care.” Cobbett likes a landscape to be productive, shipshape. “

p. 117 “Riding back to London from Dover on 3 September 1823, he notes the wretched condition of the labourers in the district: “Invariably have I observed, that the richer the soil, and the more destitute the woods; that is to say, the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers.. In this beautiful island, every inch of land is appropriated by the rich. No hedges, no ditches, no commons, no grassy lanes: a country divided into great farms; a few trees surround the great farm-house. All the rest is bare of trees; and the wretched labourer has not a stick of wood, and has no place for a pig or cow to graze, or even to lie down upon. The rabbit countries are the countries for labouring men. There the ground is not so valuable.”

p. 66 Many historians consider a smallbook of recipes published by Amelia Simmons in 1796 to be the first American cooker book because it contains American ingredients married to British culinary practices. Simmon’s recipes call for maize (still called Indian meal), pumpkins and cranberries among others. Thomas Hariot, John Smith and William Bradford among the earliest Englishmen in America would have readily taken to these dishes, but other early colonists did so only out of necessity. All spoke of the abundance of native American foods and how well people could fare upon them. Hariot declared that “Indian corn yields 100 London bushels while in England wheat yields 40 … Plus one man can in 24 hours of labor produce enough to last 12 months. .. once maize reached Europe it was destined to be food for poor backcountry folks and food animals.”

p. 67 “Nor was the corn produced in the same way as that used at least y Native peoples of New England. No patches were cut out of nutrient-rich forests, then left to fallow. Instead, corn came to be grown as a commoditized crop in larger cleared fields, sent to powered gristmills and then sold cheaply. Thus was a pattern set for America’s food and the way that it was and is produced.”

p. 239 The overwhelming majority of the millions who streamed into the United States between 1880 and 1920 came from eastern, southern, north and central Europe. Italians, mostly from south of Rome and Sicily, numbered more than 5 million. One-third returned after making enough money to purchase a farm or business back home; some of these food companies then shipped products such as olive oil to America. Two million Jews who fled pogroms and conscription in Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Messarabia found their way to America… some 1.5 million Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Danes fled poverty and political difficulties to settle in the rural and urban upper Midwest. Greeks, mainly from the poorest upland regions of the Peloponnese, numbered about 400,000 in the same period… some traditional foodways remained within communities. Germans had the most powerful effect on American food from the mid-19th century, as in lager beer, sausage culture, bread, sauerkraut. But if it comes to numbers of dining places, then one might argue for Chinese. in the 21st century there are roughly 41,000 Chinese restaurants in America, a number far outstripping hamburger and mid-level restaurant chains. .. famous for two Americanized dishes, chop suey and chow mien… Around 1890 New Yorkers, especially the ‘Bohemian’ crowd seeking new taste sensations, began going to Chinatown for these bargain dishes. The same happened in other cities such as Chicago, where cheap Chinese eateries opened in the red light district for louche clientele.”

p. 300 Hamburger chains abound., not so with hot dogs. … perhaps it is that from their beginning as street food in the late 19th century, hot dogs have ramified into many regional and local styles, their differences celebrated by local communities and widely noted in the press… the food chain from animals to factory may be in the hands of a relatively few restaurant and processing companies, but absolute hegemony, not the cultural kind at least, does not work.”