Paying rent in Eels

I wonder if it's only Americans who read the subject line and thought it was about paying rent in an English town called Eels.
 
sknox said:
I wonder if it's only Americans who read the subject line and thought it was about paying rent in an English town called Eels.
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Yes, that occurred to me, too. In fact I opened the thread to find out which one it was, with eels or in Eels.

I mean, I know the English eat eels, but it's not a dish served in these parts at all.
 
But then for something as mundane as paying the rent, why a hovercraft?

I feel like there must be a joke or tagline here and I am missing it. (As I so frequently do.)
 
And I don't remember that one. I am going to treasure my hovercraft is full of eels for some time to come.
 
Teresa Edgerton said:
Yes, that occurred to me, too. In fact I opened the thread to find out which one it was, with eels or in Eels.

I mean, I know the English eat eels, but it's not a dish served in these parts at all.
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That’ll be some English, Teresa, in fact very few.

The only time I’ve eaten eel was in fish soup in Japan - I say ‘eaten’ it was by accident and I certainly didn’t swallow it. Not pleasant.
 
Teresa Edgerton said:
I know the English eat eels, but it's not a dish served in these parts at all.
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mosaix said:
That’ll be some English, Teresa, in fact very few.
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That is the point made in the link I provided, that it only stands out to as us as peculiar because we no longer eat eels on a regular basis.

One of the peculiar aspects of the Domesday register of 1086 are the range of taxes that the English paid in-kind. Domesday records payments in pigs, in fish, in ale, and in many other types of food. Of these in-kind payments, the one that stands out most to modern viewers is likely the eel-rents. This is in part because, in Europe and the Americas, we have generally moved away from eating eel on anything like a regular basis. Consequently, the idea of eels having any type of social or economic value appears less normal to us the thought of other animals or commodities having negotiable value. We still eat pigs and drink ale. But the eel-rents also stand out for the sometimes excessive numbers of animals at play — the village of Harmston, for example, owed the Earl Hugh 75,000 eels per year, and fishermen in Wisbech needed to pay various local monasteries a combined total of almost 35,000 per year.
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However, it is also the sheer number of eels involved. I think King William and his wife, Matilda both received hundreds of thousands of eels annually, whereas pigs or barrels of ale would only be in the tens or hundreds. So, the numbers involved stand out from the pages too.
 
We had smoked eel just the other day. A local fishery sells its trout at our farmers market and one month they had eel, too, so we bought one. I don't know where they'd sourced the eel, but I suspect they'd only done the smoking bit, as they have their own smokery for their fish. Anyhow, it was a bit fiddly as you have to rip off the thick skin and remove the long bone. I don't think I'd have picked it out as eel in a blind tasting -- it just tasted like smoked fish, but perhaps a little firmer -- but it was fine, and even better when we mashed it up with some cream and creme fraiche to make a rough pate.

I suspect it would also be more amenable to drying than other freshwater fish, just as you get dried cod, so it would be invaluable in months when other food wasn't easily available, and, of course, fish was eaten a great deal more in the middle ages, not least thanks to religious dictates.

By the way, when we bought it, I mentioned to the vendor that we'd heard of jellied eel, but never tried it, and she said not to bother -- "tastes just like snot"!!
 
The only time I had oysters - or to be accurate one oyster - chewy and tastes like snot was my reaction.
 
The Judge said:
A local fishery sells its trout at our farmers market
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Perhaps I ought to point out that Her Honour doesn't live that far away from what used to be one terminal of a hovercraft-based ferry service.

I'll leave others to speculate about any Hungarian connections Her Honour might have (mainly because I don't think it's likely that there are any...).


:rolleyes:​
 
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