My older brother would dive for them in the winter in the lakes and spear them underwater, you had to cut out an ice hole first!

I will be in Kyoto in about a week, I am looking forward to tasting all the lovely foods and dishes you so eloquently write about and describe with such passion! Thank you for your work, I view y7our site for ‘lunch’ when I get a hankering for Japanese food.

Thank you for another informative post!

You may be interested to know that the French too love eel, at least in the southern regions, and they have their own approach to the bones and weak flavor. They skin the eel whole, cut it across in chunks, and then cook it by various means — smoking is quite common. Once the meat is cooked, it can be peeled off the bones quite easily, and since the spine is left in during cooking most of the side-bones stay with the skeleton. The remainder can be removed with a tweezers, in the same way as you remove the pin-bones of a salmon fillet.

Jacques Pepin provides a recipe in his Art of Cooking, volume 2, beginning with whole eels. You kill, gut, and peel the eels, and then smoke them; the smoked eel chunks are rolled up tightly (a la nori maki) with eggplant and roasted red peppers, putting the eggplant skin on the outside. This long roll is then chilled and sliced, and served with mustard or something (I forget). I suspect the Kyoto foodies would love it, if you could find a way to smoke fish and not infuriate your neighbors.

The English used to love eels, generally smoked and/or pickled, in part because a huge number used to swim up the Thames and other southern rivers quite a way and could be gathered very easily, but these days they seem to have lost the taste. Mrs. Beeton has some recipes for those interested.