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.
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.