The Story of Sushi (24 page)

T
he Japanese call freshwater eels
unagi,
and saltwater eels
anago.
Most eel served in contemporary sushi is the freshwater variety. Either way, sushi chefs never serve it raw. They cook it, and often heat it a second time in a toaster just before serving. Eel muscle contains too much collagen—the tough connective tissue—to eat raw. Cooking gelatinizes the collagen.

The Japanese ate freshwater eel long before it became a sushi topping. Shopkeepers in old Tokyo killed live eels to order. They grilled them, a meal that continues to be popular. Even after the invention of
nigiri,
sushi chefs didn’t serve freshwater eel on sushi rice because they judged it to be too rich and sweet. Instead, they boiled and served saltwater eel, which has a lighter taste. Connoisseurs still consider saltwater eel a better match for sushi.

In America, it has taken the popularity of sushi to get people interested in eating eel. There is some irony in this, because eel is one of the oldest and most adored dishes in Western cuisine, going back to the ancient Greeks. Eel pies were a popular street food in Paris and London, and eel was a staple ingredient for recipes in early English cookbooks. The early European settlers in America had little experience eating, say, lobsters, but eels made them feel right at home, and they ate them in abundance. After the Civil War, though, something changed. Americans decided they were above eels. In Europe, eel is still a popular dish.

To be fair, eels can seem primitive and grotesque. They are nocturnal and serpentine, and they emit slime, though slime is actually a sign of clean living, since the mucus protects the eels against bacteria. Eels even have a history as an instrument of terror. The Romans used dried eels as belts with which to discipline young boys.

Rabbis judged eels to be not kosher, but that was a mistake. Eels have scales; they’re just very small and embedded deeply in the skin, which makes it easier for eels to slither in tight spaces.

Eels also seem to stir some deep sexual impulse. The Japanese believe eel meat to be an aphrodisiac.

How eels themselves have sex has been the subject of great curiosity through the ages. No one ever saw them mating. Aristotle concluded that they spontaneously arose from mud. A Greek naturalist society in the second century AD decided that eel sex must involve a lot of rubbing, and that mucous must be the eels’ sexual fluid. Sigmund Freud’s first assignment in medical school was to discover where eels hid their testicles. He couldn’t find them.

In the 1890s, European scientists came closer to solving the mystery of eel sex by studying “glass eels.” Glass eels are miniature, oceangoing eels. They are transparent and look like little shards of glass. The scientists discovered that glass eels are actually just baby freshwater eels. Mysteriously, the glass eels all seemed to be swimming toward Europe from some distant point in the sea.

An obsessed Danish biologist named Johannes Schmidt launched expedition after expedition, sailing deeper into the Atlantic on each journey. The glass eels he caught were smaller and younger the farther he went. In 1922, after eighteen years, he finally discovered where they were all coming from: the Bermuda Triangle.

As far as scientists can tell, all American and European freshwater eels are born in or near the seaweed-filled Sargasso Sea, in the Bermuda Triangle. After hatching, the baby eels leave the Sargasso and start swimming. They don’t stop until they reach their destination. That destination could be a river in Iowa or a river in Germany. The journey to Europe can take a glass eel two or three years to complete. Relative to body size, it’s the equivalent of a human swimming to the moon.

Asian eels do the same thing, except in the Pacific. They’re all born at one place in the Philippine Sea, and from there they journey to rivers all over Asia.

Adult eels live in their freshwater homes for eight to ten years, some much longer. They eat until their bodies contain nearly 30 percent fat, and toward the end of their lives they slither back to the sea to mate.

As they leave freshwater, their digestive systems dissolve and disappear. They will never eat again. Like salmon, they survive by digesting their own fat, and after that, their own muscle protein. Scientists assume that they return to the Sargasso and Philippine seas to mate, but to this day no one has witnessed eels spawning, and no one knows how they travel so far without food. In human terms, it’s like having just one chance at sex before you die, but you have to swim from the moon to earth—without stopping to eat—to get it. No wonder the Japanese consider eels an aphrodisiac.

The
unagi
at the sushi bar have not lived out their natural life. They start out as glass eels in the Sargasso or Philippine seas. They arrive at freshwater and begin to swim upriver. But everywhere they go—whether throughout Europe, across Asia, or up and down the East Coast of the United States—people with nets have lined the riverbanks. The people catch the baby eels in droves.

Fishermen refer to the eels at this stage as elvers. Buyers from Taiwan and China show up in Maine, South Carolina, and Florida and often pay hundreds of dollars a pound. During particularly lucrative years, people have made more money selling elvers than they could have made by selling heroin. Sometimes people use guns to secure the best fishing spots.

The buyers ship the elvers alive to huge farming operations back in Taiwan and China, where they are grown to market size. Then they slaughter them, broil the fillets, and slather them with soy sauce that’s generally loaded with corn syrup, caramel color, and MSG. They vacuum-pack the fillets, freeze them, and ship them to sushi bars around the world.

Dedicated sushi chefs buy their eels live, and the best chefs
stick to
anago,
saltwater eels. The saltwater eel is a close relative of the freshwater eel, and scientists think it undergoes a similar life cycle with a similar migration.

Eels taste best when the chef cuts them open while the animal is still squirming, because in eels, the taste component IMP breaks down rapidly. On Monday in class, Zoran told the students that at Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, he and Toshi had eaten eel at a stand where, three feet away, a man filleted the animals alive.

“They actually have to pin it down,” Zoran said. “Do you know what they use?”

“Hammer and nails?” one of the students asked.

“Almost. Here, I’ll show you a picture.” Zoran produced a stack of gruesome photos. “Eel is a true test of a sushi chef, because it is very difficult to prepare. They put them on the cutting board and put a big spike right through the eye.”

Zoran put the photos away and showed the students a package of prepared eel from China.

“
Unagi
is easy, right? We just open the package and put it in the toaster.” He held up his hand. “But
never
cut
unagi
at the sushi bar. You don’t want customers to see you taking it out of the package.”

Zoran tossed the pack of
unagi
back in the fridge. “But
anago,
we have to fillet and then cook.” He sent one of the students into the kitchen to fetch a plastic bag.

Zoran set out a stack of bamboo colanders, and the student returned with the bag. Through the clear plastic, the contents looked like gray hoses, except that they had eyes. According to the label, the eels had come from Korea.

“Go on,” Zoran said, “take them out of the plastic. I don’t want to get my hands on those things!”

The student cut open the bag and caught a whiff. “Oh, man!”

Kate wrinkled her nose.

“Now,” Zoran continued, “what’s the first thing we need to do with them?
Wash!
They are slimy. Then we salt them, then fillet. Do
not
throw away the head. We’ll use them—you’ll see.”

Zoran ripped open the package and emptied the eels into a large steel pan, along with their gooey white slime.

“Usually
anago
live in the bottom of sandy crevices. See, look at these teeth.” He pulled open an eel’s mouth. “They can be mean.
In Japan, when the yakuza kill you, they take your body to an eel farm and dump it in.” When divers discover human corpses in rivers, eels are often nibbling on them.

Zoran gestured at the pile of eels. “Come on! I don’t want to get my hands all bloody slimy!” Nobody moved. “Come on! We haven’t got time, let’s go!”

In the comic book
Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job,
the young female chef Kirara impresses a male colleague by grabbing up slimy seawater eels and handling them without a trace of disgust. At the California Sushi Academy, one of the students now heeded Zoran’s call and slowly stepped forward. It was Kate. She started lifting eels out of the pan. One by one, her classmates followed.

Each eel was a foot and a half long. They were thin and flat. They had dark brown backs, little fins behind the head, and white spots along the sides. They tapered to a pointy tail. Kate saw they’d been gutted. Whoever had packaged and frozen the eels in Korea had done the worst work already.

Zoran lifted one of the eels and laid it on his cutting board. Using his fillet knife he sliced off the dorsal fin that ran the length of the back. He cut off the head, the front fins, and the stomach lining, and he pulled out a few bones.

The students imitated Zoran. The greatest challenge was slicing off the long dorsal fin. It turned out to be a painstaking job. They hunched over their cutting boards.

In the kitchen, Zoran set a wide pan on the big burner and sautéed the eel heads in oil. Once they were nice and brown, he transferred them to the broiler. When the students finished filleting they filed into the kitchen. Zoran mixed water, sake, mirin, soy sauce, and sugar, and heated it on the stove. The students lowered their ribbons of eel flesh into the pot.

When the eels had cooked, Zoran hefted the steaming pot and deposited it on the kitchen table, next to a bowl of ice water. The students gathered round. Suddenly the situation looked unpleasantly familiar—rather like the time they had tenderized snapper skin.

This time, Zoran soaked his hands in the ice bath for a moment,
then dunked them straight into the steaming water. He removed a ribbon of cooked eel. He held it gently, supporting it so the fragile flesh wouldn’t fall apart. He laid it carefully in a tray. His hands were bright red. Steam billowed off them.

“Your turn,” he said. “Hands in the ice, then pick up the
anago,
place it on the tray, and make sure they’re
flat.
The meat is soft—that’s why you must use your hands. They’ve got to be laid flat.”

Marcos stepped forward. He’d been out late at a concert the night before, and was only just waking up. He soaked his hands in the ice water for a moment. Then he jabbed them into the pot and grabbed a steaming piece of eel. Now he was wide awake. He winced, then hurled the eel out onto the tray as if he were tossing a ball in a rugby match.

Kate stepped forward. When her hands hit the hot water, she yelped and chucked the eel out even faster than Marcos.

“Are you
kidding
?!” she blurted, shaking her red hands. “This is madness!”

The next student took his turn. He flinched and dropped his eel back into the pot. It broke in two. Another student went. He held on, and rotated over to the tray, yelling in pain the whole time—“Ugh! Argh!” Both students danced on their feet and shook their arms.

Zoran pulled out two more eels. He rearranged the students’ pieces on the tray and yelled at them.

“Guys, which part of
flat
don’t you understand?” Several ribbons of eel remained in the pot. “Come on, come on!” Zoran bellowed. “Get your five grand worth!”

The students struggled with the eels while Zoran dashed to the broiler and retrieved the heads. When the pot was empty of eels, he dropped the heads into the broth.

“We’ll boil this for thirty minutes,” he said. After that he would show the students how to make eel sauce. Americans love eel sauce—possibly because it’s full of sugar. Most of them have no idea it contains eel brains.

“The thing about Western customers,” Zoran complained, “is that you make them eel sushi with sauce already on it, and they
still
put it in the bloody soy sauce!”

Half an hour later, Zoran called the students back to the
kitchen. To the broth with the boiled heads he added more sugar, more sweet mirin, and corn syrup. Average sushi restaurants use mass-produced eel sauce. The better restaurants make it themselves, and the best have their own secret recipe.

“Then we simmer it for five to six hours,” Zoran said.

He herded the students back to the classroom to set up the Monday lunch counter.

They opened the doors at noon. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and a warm breeze blew in. Disco played on the sound system. Soon the bar was full of customers and the students were busy making sushi.

Zoran strolled over to a stool on the far side of the classroom and sat down, one foot resting on the floor, the other dangling off the stool. He leaned his back against the wall. It was the first time he’d stopped moving all day. It was the last time he would see his students standing behind the sushi bar, serving customers.

Zoran watched Kate. She stood next to Takumi. She joked and laughed with the customers, while Takumi kept quiet. Together, they delivered a beautiful platter to a woman at the bar.

The woman sucked in her breath. “You guys do a great job!”

Someone switched the music from disco to funk. Kate goaded Takumi, trying to get him to dance. Finally he relented. He held a piece of sushi over his head and squeezed it while gyrating his hips, doing a sushi-making dance. Kate and the customers clapped. Takumi collapsed into embarrassed laughter. None of them had any idea that shy, quiet Takumi used to sing and dance in front of crowds of fans for a living.

Monday was the Hama Hermosa chef’s day off. As usual, the restaurant was closed for dinner that night. Toshi and the other chefs took Zoran out for a meal before his return to Australia. Everyone was sick of sushi. They went out for Korean barbecue. They gathered around a communal fire in the center of their table and seared slabs of beef and pork, smoke billowing toward the ceiling.