History
The eel was a cheap, nutritious and readily available food source for the people of London; European eels were once so common in the Thames that nets were set as far upriver as London itself, and eels became a staple for London's poor.
The first "Eel Pie & Mash Houses" opened in London in the 18th century, and the oldest surviving shop, M Manze, has been open since 1902.
Although jellied eels are nowhere near as popular today as they were—at the end of the Second World War there were as many as a hundred Eel Pie & Mash Houses in London—they can still be found in the eighty or so Eel Pie & Mash Houses that remain, and in some supermarkets. The water quality of the Thames has improved since the 1960s and is now suitable for recolonisation by eels—indeed, the Environment Agency supports a Thames fishery, allowing nets as far upriver as Tower Bridge—but lessened demand for cheap nutrition, competition from other foods and changing tastes mean that they have been marginalised.
Read more about this topic: Jellied Eels
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)