Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [62]
The elvers now come together in broods. They can be seen stringing along for miles in a yard-wide cordon or eel-fare (from which we have the word elver), pushing upstream at night with a strength incredible to anyone who has bought 500 g (1 lb) of elvers, feeble, thread-like things, from Gloucester market. Winds, tides, the hours of daylight, and of darkness which is their travelling time, all affect their speed, but they aren’t stopped by obstacles in their way. One French biologist remarked that he had seen them pass waterfalls, weirs, locks. He had seen them climb vertical walls, lock walls, even coming out of the water so long as there was a little moisture. The bodies of the casualties stick to the walls to make a sort of ladder for the push of elvers behind. They can wriggle themselves through the narrowest cracks… ‘and so they manage to populate the smallest stretches of water, even those which might seem to have no connection at all with a river’.
It is at night, between ebb and falling tide, that the Severn elver-fisherman sets out. He carries a scoop net, and a bucket for the catch; he has a lamp too, and sticks to support it. The elvers are mainly dispatched to the eel farms of northern Europe, but some are kept for the housewives of the Severn area as a spring delicacy for suppertime. If you live anywhere near Gloucester, it is worth making a visit in March (or April according to the season) to find elvers, to see the elver-fisherman’s equipment in the Folk Museum in Westgate Street, and buy an excellent illustrated guide to the Severn Fishery collection, by John Neufville Taylor. At Frampton-on-Severn, there is an annual elver-eating competition: the record – 500 g (1 lb) in a minute – is held by the village garage mechanic.
The elvers which survive the journey, and the attentions of fishermen, grow slowly to maturity in the hidden crannies of streams. Young eels are yellowish at first (yellow eels are not worth eating), then after eight years or more their flanks turn to silver and they are ready for the long swim home. In autumn, the ones who can return downstream, avoiding nets stretched across many rivers, and barriers of basketwork and reeds, with more or less success. These silver eels, mature eels, are the best. They are caught in tons at the mouths of some rivers: at Comacchio on the Po, it has been known for 1,000 tons to be caught in a single night. A favourite dish there is a simple soup of eel layered with slices of onion, carrot, and celery and seasoned with parsley and lemon rind. The eel is covered with water, and halfway through the cooking a spoonful or two of tomato concentrate and wine vinegar are added.
Once in salt water, the silver eel streaks out for the Sargasso Sea, thousands of miles away, fathoms down, along dark cold currents, with no light or fishing nets to impede its path. Eel from the Black Sea may take a year, but eel from Western Europe will do it in about six months, ready to spawn in the spring.
Only the European eel, Anguilla anguilla, makes so arduous and – to our mind – so moving a journey (other species, Anguilla rostrata, or japonica, or australis, have their spawning grounds comparatively close to the streams of North America, or Japan or Australia). As the salmon knows its way back to the river where it was born, so the eel knows its way back to the Sargasso Sea – but how much longer a journey that is. Mature eels are never found returning to Europe, so it seems that once they have spawned they die exhausted by the double effort: ‘The Sargasso Sea is at once their grave, and the cradle of their descendants.’1
As to the elvers