Smoked Eel & Bacon Salad

I love eel. Far from the sinister, flesh-eating beasts of popular imagination, they’re actually remarkable creatures, whose life cycle makes the salmon look laid-back. Born somewhere in the vast, strange mass that is the Sargasso Sea, they float over thousands of miles as leptocephali – gossamer, leaf-like larvae – at the mercy of predators both above and below, before turning into tiny elvers when they hit brackish water. It’s then upstream to find a home and hang about for a few ye