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James Prosek, Mystery Travelers; They spend decades in rivers and lakes, then cross oceans and spawn in secret. National Geographic, September 2010.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/09/eels/prosek-text
Quote:
(a) American cooking:
"Then six years ago, while heading down Route 17 in the Catskills of New York State on a cold November day, I decided to follow a sign that said, 'Delaware Delicacies, Smokehouse.' * * * [owner Ray] Turner hot smokes his eels and sells them to passersby, as well as to restaurants and retailers * * * 'I consider the eels to be the best quality protein in my line—a very unique flavor of fish, applewood smoke, and a momentary lingering of dark, fall honey. All the fish I smoke, trout and salmon, are farm raised, except the eels. The eels are wild. They're like free-range.'
"Back at the smokehouse, Turner showed me the two concrete-block chambers where the eels—dressed and brined in salt, brown sugar, and local honey—are hung on rods. Behind each chamber is a 55-gallon-drum stove with a door on the front and a chimney hole with two pipes in the back. Once the fire is going in the stove, Turner directs the heat and smoke into the chamber, and the eels are cooked at 160 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit for a minimum of four hours.
"He ushered me through the back door, past neat stacks of hand-split applewood, to a wooden tank, like a giant wine cask cut in half, covered in moss and dripping water through its swollen slats. I peered over the chicken wire around the rim into a clear pool. Turner stirred the water with a net, agitating some 500 silvery eels, most about as big around as a dollar coin and up to three feet long. They were lithe and sensuous—just magical.
(b) Japanese cooking:
"The international trade, driven largely by Japan's appetite for grilled eel, called kabayaki, is a multibillion-dollar industry. In Japan, eel is believed to increase one's stamina in the heat, and Doyo Ushi No Hi, eel day, usually falls in late July. During that month in 2009 at Tokyo's famed Tsukiji seafood market, more than 111,500 pounds of fresh eel were sold. Eel is almost always eaten in eel-only restaurants, because of the difficulty in cleaning and cooking the fish. It is never served raw: The blood contains a neurotoxin that's neutralized when cooked or hot smoked. (A tiny amount of eel-blood serum injected into a rabbit causes instant convulsions and death.)
"The eel is grilled on bamboo skewers over a hot wood fire, repeatedly dipped in water, and returned to the fire to steam the meat. Then it's glazed with a sauce of soy, mirin (sweet rice wine), and sugar and sprinkled with sansho, mountain pepper. This dish, most often a single eel split and splayed over a bed of rice in a black, lacquered box with a red interior, is called unaju. No part of the fish goes to waste. The liver is served in a soup, and the spine is deep-fried and eaten like a cracker. Though it may be part of Japan's food folklore, it is said that in Tokyo the eel is filleted along the back to avoid mimicking the samurai warrior's ritual knife-in-the-belly suicide. In Kyoto, where there were fewer samurai, it is filleted along the belly.
(c) modern raising of eels:
"An eel served in a restaurant in Manhattan may have hatched in the Atlantic Ocean, been netted in a river mouth in the Basque region of France, flown to Hong Kong, raised at a farm in nearby Fujian or Guangdong Provinces, cleaned, grilled, and packaged in factories near the farms, and finally flown to New York City. Readying eels for market usually involves catching babies—called glass eels because of their transparency—when they arrive in fresh water from the ocean and shipping them to warehouse-style farms in China for fattening up. The trade remains dependent on the capture of wild fish because no one has figured out how to reproduce eels profitably in captivity.
My comment:
(1) The life cycle of an eel, from this article:
"Most migratory fish, such as salmon and shad, are anadromous, spawning in fresh water and living as adults in salt water. The freshwater eel is one of the few fishes that do the opposite, spawning in the ocean and spending their adulthood in lakes, rivers, and estuaries—a life history known as catadromy.
(2) This article talks about biology of eels. The quotations above are the food aspects of the article.
(3) 鱔魚 Monopterus albus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopterus_albus
in Taiwan is different from eels (both shares the same "class" in Linnaean taxonomy).
(4) There is no need to read the rest of the article. In case you do, the followings may be helful.
(a) Catskill Mountains
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catskill_Mountains
(Originally, the mountains' name was spelled "Kaatskil" by the 17th Century Dutch settlersthe; meaning of the name ("cat creek" in Dutch))
(b) weir
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weir
(c) Sargasso Sea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargasso_Sea
(section 1 History)
(d) padock (n): "a usually enclosed area used especially for pasturing or exercising animals"
www.m-w.com
(e) Katsumi TSUKAMOTO 塚本勝巳 (東京大学海洋研究所)
(f) Lake Ontario
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Ontario
(g) kabayaki 蒲焼き(n): "loach or eel dipped and broiled in soy-based sauce"
All Japanese definitions are from Jim Breen's online Japanese dictionary.
(h) Doyo no Ushi No Hi 土用の丑の日 (literally ox day; July 20, a day decated to eating eel)
doyo 土用 【どよう】 (n): "midsummer; dog days"
ushi 丑 【うし】 (n): "second sign of Chinese zodiac (The Ox 牛, 1am-3am, north-northeast, December)"
(i) Tsukiji 築地 (市場)
(j) mirin みりん 《味醂》 (n): "type of sweet sake used in cooking"
(k) unaju 鰻重 【うなじゅう】 (n): "broiled eel served over rice a lacquered box"
(l) For glass eel, see
eel life history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_life_history
(The larvae of European eels travel with the Gulf Stream across the ocean and, after one to three years, their leptocephali reach a size of 75 – 90 mm before they reach the coasts of Europe. The common name for this recruiment stage of eels is glass eel, based on the transparency of the body)
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※ 修改:．choi 于 Jan 22 16:07:32 修改本文．[FROM: 129.10.0.0]
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发表于 1-22-2011 13:05:09
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