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Wait till you hear about what they do with eels...
I used to hate jellied eels, but recently I've come around to them. It's a working class meal using the natural resources that were available to them. And although it sounds horrible, it's literally just boiled eel with spices, vinegar and lemon, often served with parsley sauce. It can't be that bad.
I just don't get the boiled part. Fried fish is delicious, so surely fried eel would be tasty too? But boiled fish is gross, it makes me want to throw up, and I'll normally eat pretty much anything.
Oh yeah I guess I’ve never really eaten boiled fish so idk. But even so, even if you don’t like boiled fish, boiling seafood is pretty common. I’ve eaten fish stew/soup before and it’s good, and I’m not a big clam chowder fan but it definitely has its supporters, so idk just seems like jellied eel has been unfairly maligned when really it’s pretty tame in the grand scheme of things.
I used to have a housemate who would boil whole fish, after leaving them to defrost on the kitchen counter for hours. It smelled disgusting and the whole house would reek for days afterwards. Even our other housemates' curries weren't enough to mask the stench.
But my point is that the English are not the only ones in the world boiling their fish, and so jellied eels are I believe unfairly maligned as some sort of affront to god. Even if they don’t taste great (and I’ve never had them so I can’t say if they do or not), they’re not particularly notable in their preparation nor their ingredients when looking at world cuisine as a whole.
Oh yeah, I don't disagree with you at all on that. Eels are just another kind of fish. It is weird that they are singled out (though as others have pointed out, they're very much a working class food, so it's probably classism) I was just going off on a tangent about how I don't like boiled fish in general.
Can't any more because of The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) population has declined by 98% since 1980
Well yeah. Tbh freshwater eels are so endangered idk if I’d eat one even if I had the option. But culinarily I don’t think jellied eels are the worst thing in the world, and the history of the dish is a working class history
Sorry to disappoint, but in all my time here, I've never seen jellied eel. It's not a thing anymore, alas.