I love to eat eel, particularly smoked eel but never cook it, not since the first time when I had A Bad Experience.
I was working in Ballinakill House in Waterford at this time so it must have been some time in the early eighties.
I arrived in to work one evening to find that my boss, George Gossip, had a little treat for me; a bucket of eels.
It seemed that a local river fisherman had offered them to George and he thought we should give them a try.
I had never cooked eel before, so a quick shifty into a fish cook book was the first priority.
This way I gathered that the first essential with nearly all recipes was to skin them.The advice seemed to be to cut off the heads then pull off the skin, which was described as rather like taking off ones socks.
One piece of advice was that a little salt on the fingers helped to get a grip on this slippery fish’s skin.
I started off easily enough, chop off the heads, but then came the hard bit. It took a lot of hauling and pulling and much resource to the salt box before their extremely close fitting skin came off, about as easily as a superglued sock would.
After the first half hour I had skinned about four eels and realised that I was going to have to speed up.
This was when I made my fatal error.
I decided that one of the factors which was slowing me down was the constant dipping in and out of the salt box.
Solution?
I decided to empty most of the salt into the bucket of eels and then each one would come out ready salted and fit to be skinned.
As soon as the salt hit the eels this bucketful of what I had assumed were dead eels changed totally in character.
They started to coil around in a frenzy of what was obviously extreme pain, they coiled and churned and made every attempt to leave the bucket by doing fair imitations of the Indian rope trick.
I was devastated with guilt.
My one thought was to try and get these eels out of their agony as fast as I could.
I tried everything, running them under copious amounts of running water, immersing them in a sink of clean fresh water, but to no avail.
I decided that the only solution was to take them out of their agony by killing them by chopping off their heads.

This was as it turned out not a solution.
Even headless the eels kept up their coiling dance of torment.
I just had to proceed and skin them as they jerked and coiled in my hands.
Once skinned the movement stopped .
This added wings to my hands and eventually I was finished.

The eels had still another trick up their sleeves for me.
As soon as I got an order to cook one and it hit the hot pan it managed to my total horror to perform a further dance of death there in the pan.
(How was I to know that this is merely a post mortem contraction of muscles)

This is why I have since then adamantly refused to cook eels.