Eels in Green Sauce

On June 17, 1857, Thoreau wrote in his Cape Cod journal, “This morning had for breakfast fresh eels from Herring River, caught in an eel-pot baited with horseshoe clams cut up.” Eel recipes, for breakfast and other meals, were common in New England cook books until this century, when apparently fishermen tired of unhooking these slippery beasts and housewives tired of skinning them. Euell Gibbons, however, is probably more to the point when he says that “wherever Eel