"We regret to inform you that eel stocks are extremely low," reads a sign on M. Manze's eel and pie shop in Peckham, southeast London. "As a consequence, prices are continually increasing. It is possible stocks of eels may disappear completely in the near future."
In the past 25 years, Anguilla anguilla has declined by some 95 percent throughout Europe, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which has marked it "critically endangered" on its Red List of Threatened Species.
Their decline has been hastened by a fashion for baby glass eels, served at such high-society functions as the Duchess of Alba's wedding in Seville in October 2011, and an appetite in Asia that has seen their price reach 850 euros a kilo, or about the price of caviar, according the EU Department of Fisheries. Before they are fully grown with a chance of being a candidate for an eel and pie shop, glass eels turn into elvers. These young specimens are also a popular novelty, finding their way onto the menus of trendy restaurants such as Bermondsey's Garrison and Scott's of Mayfair.
Eels' Long Journey from Birth
The life of an eel begins in the Sargasso Sea south of Bermuda, where they are born. Transparent glass eels migrate some 4,000 miles to the rivers of Europe, where they become elvers, turning yellow as they swim up the estuaries into freshwater. Twenty years later or thereabouts (it could be 80 years), they will return to their South Atlantic place of birth where they will spawn and die.
Today many eels sold at London's Billingsgate Market come from Europe's largest commercial eel fishery in Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. In November 2011 the EU granted Lough Neagh PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) status, putting it on a par with Europe's well-known wines and cheeses.
Family-Run Eel and Pie Shops
Rising prices mean that London's eel and pie shops (never called restaurants or cafes) may equally need protection. They are appreciated for their old-fashioned décor as much as for their old-fashioned food. They usually open only at lunchtime and do not have licences to sell alcohol. Pies are individually made with meat fillings, and dishes are flavoured with liquor – a parsely sauce made with the liquid in which the eels have been cooked. The jelly in jellied eels comes from their own fat released in cooking, which solidifies on cooling. Tiled, with banquette seating and Cockney counter staff, they evoke a lost era.
Most of the shops have remained in the same family hands. Frederick Cooke opened the first on Brick Lane in 1852. Fifty years later Michele Manze, who came from Ravello in Italy, married into the family, and while Cooke's shops continued north of the river, Manze's expanded in the south, starting at Tower Bridge. Geoff Poole, grandson of Michele Manze, runs the family's shop in Sutton, and in January 2012 told the local Guardian newspaper: "Eels were already expensive to source, but now it's proving difficult to make any money. We are paying £8 a pound for eels, and that is set to go up."
In 1997 Cooke's wonderfully furnished 1910 Dalston premises, described as "the Buckingham Palace of pie shops", closed, and part of it has been re-created in Hackney Museum, where there is also a display of pie moulds and the traps and nets used by long-gone eel fishermen of London's rivers.
With the price of eels rising, there is a danger that other eel and pie shops may become museum pieces, too.
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