Last New Year's Eve, while most of you were wearing silly hats and drinking too much Champagne, I was rama tuna. For those not fluent in Maori, that's eeling, or eel-baiting.
The site was a wooded stream on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand. To rama tuna, as any good Maori knows, you wait for nightfall, then light a crackling bonfire, and sit on a damp stream bank with rod in hand. And wait and wait and wait. The rod is no more than a stick with a hook on the end of a piece of string, from which you attach a piece of malodorous meat.
The eels are supposedly attracted by the light and smell, and are hooked. I say supposedly, because we sat for hours and caught nothing.
Frankly, I was rather thankful. I didn't want to be the one to kill them, gut them, and then turn them into some culinary marvel. We went home in the early hours of the New Year and had bacon and eggs, hot chocolate and brandy, which was far more welcome than any eel concoction I could have whipped up.
In Hong Kong, getting hold of a decent freshwater eel is less of an adventure. All you have to do is to visit the wet market and select one from a trough filled with the slithering, squirming things. The fishmonger will gut, skin and debone the eel. But the process is not a pretty sight, and a quick promenade round the market while the deed is being performed is called for. Even so, eels tend to twitch disconcertingly for at least half an hour after their demise.
Eels are covered in a thick coating of slime. Hence, I suppose, the term 'slippery as an eel'. What no cookbook ever tells you is that if you're cooking it with the skin, this slime needs to be removed first. This is easily done by blanching the eel and then scraping off the slime with the back of a knife.