Bilbao drinking water is agreeable and abundant.
—José Antonio Zamácola, 1815
There is a lot of money here [in Bilbao]. What difference does it make if there isn’t a glass of fresh water?
—Sabino Arana, 1897
ABOUT THE FAMOUS Basque delicacy, baby eels, José María Busca Isusi wrote, “I believe that only in our country have people dared to prepare and consume a dish which resembles a bunch of worms.” It is a Basque habit of mind to imagine that everything Basque is uniquely Basque, but Busca Isusi was mistaken. Aside from the fact that there are people in Mexico who do not hesitate to eat real worms by the plateful, Basques are not the only ones who eat the wormlike baby eel. A baby eel is called an elver in English, angula in Spanish, pibale in French, and txitxardin, which means “wormlike,” in Euskera. Elvers appear in all European rivers that flow to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and a number of other peoples, notably Atlantic French, enjoy them. But what disturbed the Basques in the 1990s was the terrible discovery that the Japanese eat them too.
The small creatures, actually smaller than most worms, turn up in Basque rivers every winter, and became associated with Basque winter holidays, such as carnival. For centuries they were scooped out just above the mouths of Guipúzcoan rivers. Six Basque families in Aguinaga, on the Orio River only a few miles from San Sebastián, became the principal suppliers in the world.
Elver fishermen waited for nightfall before dragging the river, because the elvers stay on the bottom, resting during the day. Eels avoid light. At night, the fishermen would haul up a fine weave of white squirmy creatures, which they then kept alive in their own freshwater tanks for about a week until the elvers’ backs mysteriously turned dark. Since a dead eel will not turn color, the dark color ensures that the eel was taken live. This issue took on added importance as the rivers grew increasingly polluted and inhospitable to delicate little elvers.
Like all eel, elvers must be cooked live or shortly after death to maintain an agreeable texture. The fisheries are very secretive about the exact process, maintaining that this is where the real quality of the product is determined. The chief defense of an eel is its slipperiness, which comes not only from its smooth skin— the scales are ingrown—but also from glands that secrete a slime, which must somehow be removed. Plunging them in salty lukewarm water after cooking is part of the process. Then they are wrapped in cloth to be kept moist.
The elvers are sold all over Spain and exported fresh, frozen, or canned to France and Latin America. The Basques usually prepare them in olive oil, garlic, and peppers. The recipe stays the same, but the servings have gotten smaller every year.
In the 1980s, when the Orio and other rivers turned green with surfaces that were sometimes foamy and other times dark and pearly, the catches were so meager that it was widely believed the eels were dying out. The price tripled, and the Aguinaga fisheries could still not meet the demand.
That was when one of the old established Basque family-owned companies, Angulas Aguinaga, decided it was time for an alternative. It turned from the Orio to the Japanese for technology to convert surimi into a substitute elver. Surimi is the white flesh of bottom-feeding fish that has been pressed into blocks on factory ships. At one time it was made from Atlantic cod, but when that was overfished, Pacific pollack took its place. Japan’s Nichirei Corporation designed machines for Angulas Aguinaga that force the surimi out, spaghettilike, into the shape of elvers. A touch of squid ink tints the backs dark. Angulas Aguinaga, which has no Japanese on its staff, produces the substitute elvers in a factory in the Guipúzcoan industrial mountain village of Irura. It sells 500 tons of these fake angulas, which it calls gulas, in a good year.
“It’s a completely natural product,” asserted Angulas Aguinaga sales director Juan Carlos Souto Ibañez, although the list of ingredients on the package includes Monosodium Glutamate E-415. Souto Ibañez further asserted that unlike angulas, gulas are cholesterol-free.
What they are not is eels, and they have neither the same taste nor texture. Visually, the main difference is that there is no face. The two black specks that are eyes and the thread line of a tiny mouth on one end are missing. In the Basque provinces, where it is widely believed that it is the Japanese who are making gulas in Irura, discriminating consumers sift through their sizzling earthenware casserole with the traditional wooden fork that is always provided, and search for faces before they eat. Some Basques do not even trust this test. Against all logic and evidence, persistent rumors are heard that “the Japanese are painting fake faces on gulas.”
An angulero, an angula fisherman in Aguinaga, on the Orio in the 1920s. (Kutxa Fototeka, San Sebastián)
Souto Ibañez points out that his company deliberately left off the faces and changed the name to gulas, so that they could not be accused of perpetrating a fraud.
“It’s a swindle,” José María Otamendi, director of a traditional elver fishery, El Angulero de Aguinaga, nevertheless declared. Although gulas were selling for $16 per pound instead of the $40 per pound for elvers, he asserted that this was still “very expensive for some unknown fish.”
Back in the days when Angulas Aguinaga was fishing real elvers and was really in Aguinaga, Otamendi had worked for the company. But once it changed its product, he left and returned to his own family’s business. In hip boots by the swirling tanks of the busy family elver pound, he said, “It is hard work, but it is a tradition. It is what my grandfather did and my father and my son.”
Since the Orio River, which twists past the stone houses of Aguinaga, is a suspiciously bright green-gray color, and its banks are peppered with bits of trash, the companies started supplementing their dwindling catch by buying French and British elvers. But, Angulas Aguinaga claimed to be saving the eels and even asked the European Community to ban elver fishing.
Then, in the early 1990s, the angulas started coming back.
EELS HAVE ALWAYS puzzled man. Until the 1920s, no one had been able to identify reproductive organs in the creatures, and it was often supposed that Aristotle had been right when he stated that they somehow were created out of the mud. An eighteenth-century Italian had claimed to discover an eel’s ovaries, but the scientific world did not accept his finding for another seventy years simply because no one had ever seen an eel egg. If eel eggs could have been found, no doubt the Basques would have eaten them too.
In the twentieth century, the surprising discovery was made that the eels in the Orio were not Basque at all. In fact, all of the European eels and all of the American eels, a related species but with approximately ten fewer vertebrae, are born in the middle of the Atlantic, in the deep, warm, algae-laden waters off Bermuda known as the Sargasso Sea.
The tiny, newborn, oval-shaped creatures then begin a journey, like salmon in reverse, to the river of their parents’ adulthood. By the second summer they pass the Azores and have grown to five times their original size, but are still only a quarter the size of a tiny river elver. In the fall of the third year, they reach the Orio River and continue to grow, until they become angula size by the winter.
Most of this process is still unknown. Once a full-grown eel leaves a European river, it seems to vanish in the depths, and the cycle has never been entirely traced. So it was not known why, later in the 1990s, the eels began to disappear from the rivers once again. Was it pollution? Aguinaga fishermen had been saying for years that most of the elvers that they didn’t catch quickly, died in the green Orio. Or were they just taking too many of them? Every elver that is eaten is one that will not grow into an eel and swim back to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce.
And yet the Basques had always taken huge quantities of elvers. In 1775, a British naturalist on a trip to Bilbao said that elvers were caught “by the millions.” A French naturalist, Louis Roule, made some calculations based on early-twentieth-century train records from Landes, the region on the other side of the Adour, and found that in 1906, between 100 and 150 million elvers were shipped by train.
BY THE LATE 1990s, the Basques were growing desperate. In Hendaye an elver shop operated near the St. Jacques Bridge border crossing, selling in either pesetas or francs. The shop was only open in the winter, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Soon it was sold out by Friday. Eventually it was only open one day a week. The shopkeeper’s father had bought the antique building in a viager contract, a French arrangement in which the owner is paid a lifetime salary and the payer inherits the property. The owner had died early enough so that the house had been a bargain, and with no real overhead, the son was able to be in the angula business. But after a while he did not even have enough for a full day. The storefront looked like an empty fish shop with a long refrigerated display counter inside containing only one cloth-covered shallow crate.
The son even tried selling “white elvers” for half price, which, since the price had soared to more than $100 a pound, was still not a bargain. White elvers were ones that for one reason or another had died before they got to the tanks and had been cooked already dead—the mushy ones that are usually culled from the bunch. No, most Basques would rather eat a gula.
In time, most Basque rumors prove to be at least partly true and eventually companies developed—Basque companies, not Japanese ones—surimi elvers with two dots for eyes. On close inspection by those with good enough eyesight, there is still no mouth.
IN 1998, trout and eel from the Bidasoa River were examined by the Navarra government, and although northern Navarra is thought of as one of the more pristine parts of Basqueland, the fish were found to contain high levels of heavy metals, especially copper.
But was that the real problem? All peoples are a product of their history, and Basque history has always been about defending their birthright against outsiders. And so, after centuries of scooping up every baby eel they could find, and after more than a 100 years of dumping industrial refuse in rivers, the Basques discovered the real problem with their prized elvers.
Once again, it was the Japanese. In the winter, articles began appearing in Basque newspapers saying that the Japanese were paying high prices and buying up all the angulas. One paper, La Semaine du Pays Basque, a popular weekend tabloid in French Basqueland, trying to be fair, ran the headline, “The eel, which are a delicacy to the Japanese, are disappearing from the estuaries because of pollution.”
BERNABE RAMA was born in Bilbao but speaks no Euskera. His father was from Andalusia and, being unemployed, came to Bilbao in 1945 to work as a laborer, on roads, construction— whatever he could find. Bernabe does not consider himself a nationalist or Basqueland a nation. But like many others, he uses the word inmigrante, an internal immigrant, to describe outsiders like his family.
Bernabe is the head chef at the Restaurant Bermeo, a leading traditional Bilbao restaurant. Asked for his angulas recipe, he referred to a twenty-year-old book of standard recipes. His only change was that where the old recipe had indicated angulas for four people, he crossed it out and wrote “for six.”
ANGULAS
(for six)
600 grams angulas
4 cloves garlic, sliced
a few slices of guindilla
enough olive oil to cover the bottom of a casserole
Put the casserole on a high flame wth olive oil and sliced garlic. When the garlic starts to change color, work in the angulas and guindilla slices. Keep the casserole constantly moving for 30 seconds. Then remove it. It is essential that the dish be served very hot, but not overcooked.