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Serves 6

butter

12 slices from a small sandwich loaf

meat from a large crab or 250 g (8 oz) shelled crab or shelled prawns

salt, pepper, cayenne

1 tender celery stalk, chopped finely

1 tablespoon chopped onion

150 ml (5 fl oz) mayonnaise

3 tablespoons mixed herbs – chopped parsley, tarragon, chervil and chives

3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese

approx. 175 g (6 oz) Gruyère, fontina or Gouda cheese, grated

4 eggs

250 ml (8 fl oz) milk

250 ml (8 fl oz) single cream

Butter the bread and cut off the crusts. Season the crab or prawns. Mix the celery and onion with the mayonnaise, herbs and Parmesan and then fold into the shellfish. Make six sandwiches with the mixture.

Butter a dish that will take the sandwiches in a single layer. Cut them in half and place in the dish. Dot with the grated Gruyère, fontina or Gouda. Beat the eggs with the milk and cream and pour into the dish. Leave in the fridge for 2 hours or longer (overnight will not hurt).

Bake in the oven, preheated to gas 4, 180 °C (350 °F), for 30–40 minutes, lowering the heat as the top browns.

CRAWFISH see LOBSTERS

CROAKERS & DRUMS see A FEW WORDS ABOUT… CROAKERS & DRUMS

CUTTLEFISH see SQUID

DAB see SOLE

DOGFISH see A FEW WORDS ABOUT… DOGFISH

DOLPHINFISH see A FEW WORDS ABOUT… DOLPHINFISH

DORADO see A FEW WORDS ABOUT… DOLPHINFISH

DUBLIN BAY PRAWNS see LOBSTERS

†EELS & ELVERS

(Anguilla anguilla & Anguilla rostrata)

I love eel. Sometimes I think it is my favourite fish. It is delicate, but rich; it falls neatly from the bone; grilled to golden brown and flecked with dark crustiness from a charcoal fire, it makes the best of all picnic food; stewed in red wine, cushioned with onions and mushrooms, bordered with triangles of fried bread, it is the meal for cold nights in autumn; smoked and cut into elegant fillets, it starts a wedding feast or a Christmas Eve dinner with style and confidence. Its skin is so tough that it was used to join the two parts of a flail together (think of the strain on that join as the flails thumped down to winnow the corn at harvest), or to make a whip for a boy’s top, or to bind the elastic to his catapult. The eel has picturesque habits, often lurking in old mill leats under willow roots, until it is seduced by a waisted eel-trap set by the sluice gate.

It has mystery, too. Aristotle wondered why no eel was ever found with roe or milt. This question had become a matter for poetry, or poetical prosing, by the time of Izaak Walton – ‘others say, that as pearls are made of glutinous dew drops, which are condensed by the sun’s heat in those countries, so Eels are bred of a particular dew’. The true poet, though, of this strange creature, was not Izaak Walton, or any other mystified ancient, but a biologist; the great Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt. In 1922, after twenty-five years of back-tracking eel larvae, he came right over the spawning ground, the correct ‘particular dew’.

The first larva was found by chance near the Faroe Islands in 1904; a willow-leaf of transparency, 77 mm (3 inches) long and, as it turned out, three years old. Other smaller larvae were found in the following years, further away from the coasts of Europe. Schmidt realized that if he could follow this trail of diminishing larvae, he would come to their home. Which he did in 1922 (the First World War had held things up). Right over the spawning ground, at the seaweedy eastern side of the Sargasso Sea, he brought up in his net the tiniest larvae of all – 5 mm (¼ inch) long.

Millions of them radiate out in all directions. Elvers of the American eel, Anguilla rostrata, share the same spawning grounds as the European eel’s, but veer to the west and have only a short journey to make by comparison. In a year, they reach the East Coast and wriggle in vast troops up rivers from the Gulf of the St Lawrence to Mexico. Of the elvers of Anguilla anguilla, only those caught in the Gulf Stream survive and make the journey to Europe. There, almost in sight