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Culinary Dictionary
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| Category: Seafood |
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Eel | ||
 Eel, elongated, serpent like fish of the eel order, comprising nearly 600 diverse species. These species, including the conger eel and moray, are grouped into about 20 families. They inhabit shallow coastal waters throughout the world.Freshwater eels (unagi) and marine eels (conger eel, anago) are commonly used in Japanese cuisine - foods such as Unadon and Unajuu are popular but expensive. Eels are also very popular as food in Chinese cuisine, particularly Cantonese and Shanghai cuisine. The European eel and other freshwater eels are eaten in Europe, the United States, and other places around the world. Eel blood is toxic, but the toxic protein it contains is destroyed by cooking. Appearance: Eels have no scales and are protected by a layer of slippery mucus. Their dorsal and anal fins, which run from close to the head to the often nonexistent tail fin, provide much of the thrust for these lithe swimmers. Most species are less than 1 m (3 ft) long. One conger eel, however, is known to grow up to 3 m (9 ft) long and is found as deep as 250 m (820 ft) in the ocean. History: The migration and reproduction of freshwater eels remained a mystery until the 20th century, when their spawning beds were discovered in the Sargasso Sea between Bermuda and Puerto Rico. When the very similar European eel and the American eel reach maturity in freshwater lakes and rivers, they take watercourses, sometimes slithering overland through dewy grass, to reach the ocean, where they swim or drift with currents for as long as a year until they reach the sluggish, weed-filled Sargasso. On January 31, 1930, the Danish research ship «The Dana» captured what researchers believed to be a six-foot long eel larva near South Africa's Cape of Good Hope. |