We're getting somewhere on lampreys. A young woman friend recalls summer afternoons fishing for them in the Mulcair River, Limerick. She and a 10-year-old classmate would rush home from school, strap spinning rods to their bicycles and, with her brother, then aged seven, make for Annacotty. Under the bridge they waded across pebble beds, casting unbaited over the hosts of lamprey that rested there, sucking onto stones, their bodies swaying out behind them in the current. And no tiddlers, mind. These children sniffed at foul-hooking anything below two feet in length, and frequently over three. A couple of things she remembers in particular: how a large lamprey, when disturbed, wrapped itself around her wellington boot in great coils, sucking onto the rubber with its too-thringed disc of a mouth, and had to be prised off. Secondly, the surprise of her father when she arrived home, pedalling at high speed, with the wicker basket on the front of her bike piled with 3-foot eel-like creatures. How they were disposed of, she disremembers, but is fairly sure they didn't appear on the table for eating.
Books on fish tell us that the lamprey is edible, and still eaten in Baltic countries. That's in the Collins Guide to Freshwater Life. In a wonderful tome by a most remarkable Frenchman, Alexis Soyer, the author described an Ancient Roman recipe. The Italian epicures "of that remarkable era used to kill the lamprey in Candian wine. A nutmeg was placed in the mouth, and a clove in each of the openings of the gills. (There are seven gill-pouches on either side). They rolled them round in a saucepan, and, after adding crushed almonds, bread crumbs, Candian wine and spices, the whole was cooked over a slow fire." Just that. He also tells us that "at certain times Roman nobles even paid as much as £20 for one of these fish." His book was published in 1853: The Pantropheon, or A History of Food and its Preparation in Ancient Times.
Soyer was a man of many parts, described in a publisher's note to this 1977 edition by Paddington Press as "a talented, dashing, flamboyant French egocentric whose gastronomic genius was the rage and envy of mid 19th-century England." He cooked for many nobles and notables including the Marquis of Waterford, was master chef for the London Reform Club, and on June 28, 1838, Queen Victoria's Coronation Day, he served breakfast for 2,000 people. He also was a humanitarian and organised, according to his publishers, soup kitchens during our Famine and, with Florence Nightingale, hospital food at Balaclava in the Crimean War. More another day. Y