Cafe Maplethorpe Blog :: PEI Restaurant

One undeniable feature of rural life is that everyone makes it their business to know your business. Gossip on PEI is legendary, once described to me by a life-long resident as a ‘blood sport.’ Historian David Weale quotes a UPEI professor as once telling a class “It is the God-given right of every Islander to know the business of every other Islander.”

Knowing that men who fish stop for supplies at the Village Store in Bedeque, I mentioned to store owner Susan that I wanted to find out about eel. Word spread fast and the very next day she handed me a slip of paper with a name and phone number. The Eel Whisperer. He was expecting my call.

The Eel Whisperer

tip of the eel spear

Islanders are unfailingly generous with their time and knowledge. Brian MacLeod has been fishing for eel all his life and was happy to ‘talk eel’ with a newcomer. Eel is a winter recreational fishery, allowed on PEI in December and January. The eel hibernate in river mud in about 5 feet of water. The successful fisherman has to know where on a river eels are likely to be sleeping, where mud of the right texture is located and the water depth is just right. The weather has to cooperate as well—ice thick enough to walk on, not too thick to cut through, wind and snow at bay for a few hours.

Brian advised that due to warm temperatures the ice was dangerously thin, but colder weather was moving in. He agreed to take me along on the next trip. True to his word, I got a call 2 weeks later.

sorting out the spears

Off To Find Eel

walking on the Grand River

My fishing guides Brian, Randy and Danny are comfortable with each other and seem to have an unspoken routine. Brian knows where to go and leads the way. Randy wields the chainsaw and cuts holes in the ice. Danny tends the equipment. We are on the Grand River and the ice is so thick Randy can barely open up any holes. While Brian and Danny waste no time getting spears into the first hole, Randy is cutting two more. Good thing, too—no eel in the first hole.

cutting a hole in the ice

Eel fishing is ‘blind’ fishing—methodically pushing and pulling a 12 foot long spear in and out of the mud. It is done on a slant as the fisherman slowly circles the ice hole, trying to probe every inch of the mud. They say that bumping into an eel feels like pushing a stick into a pile of wet clothes. Quickly the spear is hauled out of the water. IF the wet laundry is really an eel and not just a stick, and IF the technique of threading the spear back out of the ice hole is just right, you are rewarded with a wriggling, clearly pissed-off eel. The eel are flicked off the spear onto the ice. Fishing continues–where there is one sleeping eel there are probably more.

spearing for eel

After spending more than an hour working the first three holes and only spearing two eel, the men decide to go further up river. The wind has picked up and it is cold on the ice, but the day is bright and we spot eagles soaring overhead. The next few holes are better. We have been fishing for over 2 hours and have 18 eel. Time to head home.

picking up eel

Cleaning the Catch

Cleaning eel is a job that requires both technique and specialized equipment: a sharp knife, a pair of pliers and an 18-pack of beer for every 3 men in the shed. The skin of an eel is unbelievably tough. It’s removed by making cutting through the flesh behind the gills with the sharp knife then pulling the skin down and off in one piece with the pliers. The beer is required to help the stories flow.

The men remember rivers full of eel, not like today. As a boy Danny would take an axe in an empty feed sack and his spear to the Dunk River and within an hour he had more eels than he could drag home. Those his family didn’t keep for supper he sold door-to-door for fifty cents and made enough money to skate at the rink. Someone’s dad would clean and dry the eel skin, cut it into strips and use them for boot laces. (“The eel laces would last forever as long as you didn’t let the cat into the house. The cat would eat the laces at night.”) That story was more about Islander’s esteem for frugality than about poverty, although I suppose there were elements of both. I was surprised to hear each of the men describe their favorite way of cooking eel, and it was clear that when it came to eel, they did the cooking themselves. Parboiled first then dipped in flour and baked on a drip tray, or grilled on the bar-b-que or fried on the stovetop in a dry skillet. One remembered his mother’s eel pie, another liked eel stew.

eel on the ice

A Fine Day Spent in Good Company

Our eel fishing experience was a real treat, and a glimpse into a way of life fast disappearing on Prince Edward Island. We’re putting an eel appetizer on the supper menu for the month of February and I am experimenting with several of the eel recipes mentioned in the shed. I’ll share the best recipes once I finish fiddling with the ingredients and cooking method.

Jim is already talking about getting his own eel spear for next year.

We cooked and served at Maplethorpe right up to December 23, then dropped everything and rushed to the Halifax airport to open our Christmas gift—a week ‘s vacation in sunny Southern California. 2008 was a busy year for both the bed and breakfast and the café, and we had earned a change.

And what a change! Every suburban community has 200,000 people or more—almost half again more than then entire year-round population of PEI. Hundreds of identical Southern California communities along the beach, millions of people connected by a crazy patchwork of freeways. It sure isn’t University Avenue in Charlottetown, people.

Southern California Beaches

California Style

To blend in with the locals we were required to wear tiny shorts paired with furry knee boots and start every morning at a Starbucks. We elbowed our way through all the crowded tourist sites and gorged ourselves on Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican food, washed down with good California wine. It was all great, except one thing. We wanted to visit a bookstore called the “Cooks Library,” billed as “the place” where the hottest LA chefs go to research new recipes and purchase exotic cookbooks. I deliberately packed light on the trip out just in case I needed to drag home half a suitcase of new cookbooks from this place. We spent a morning finding it, then took another half hour finding a parking space within a mile of the shop, only to read the handwritten sign on the door that said the store was closed for a week.

The thought crossed my mind that maybe in some ironic twist they had read about Café Maplethorpe and were on Prince Edward Island right now standing on our porch reading the handwritten note on our front door…

Vacation was just about over. We watched the New Year’s Eve ball drop in New York’s Times Square on the television at 8:00 pm local time and went to bed in anticipation of our early flight back to Halifax the next morning. The week had gone by fast.

Back to Reality

The LA to New York portion of the return flight went well. Flying reminds us how anchovies feel, all packed on top of each other in those tiny cans. We got a bad sensation when we got off the plane in New York and surveyed the departure gate monitor for our Halifax flight. It wasn’t listed. As we soon found out, the Halifax airport was closed due to high winds and snow—blizzard conditions.

I asked the nearest gate agent what we were to do and she directed us to go to the gate printed on our boarding passes even if it wasn’t listed on the departure screen. Skipping past the long and ugly confrontation between the pathetic, stranded passengers and the cold-hearted airline representatives, we found ourselves several hours later on a flight to Bangor, Maine—the closest place we could get to Prince Edward Island without sleeping in a New York airport terminal for the next 3 days.

Welcome Home to PEI

I am by nature a stoic person, but my feet started to get cold in New York when we walked out on the tarmac to board the commuter airplane. They stayed cold during the flight and got even colder in Bangor where the windchill was minus about a hundred degrees. (“That’s Fahrenheit, dear, not that wimpy Celsius you people have in Canada.”) I think my husband slept on the motel room floor that night to guarantee that I didn’t touch him with my feet. Despite extra socks and a hot meal, my feet stayed frozen all the way to Prince Edward Island aboard the Acadian Bus Lines coach that brought us home the next day. Exactly one week later to the day, my feet are still cold.

When my feet are cold, I am miserable, and I can’t think of anything except warming them up. Hot baths, hot soup, hot tea, wool socks—I’ve tried them all. In case you’re wondering, it really isn’t that cold on Prince Edward Island, either. Although there is snow on the ground, the temperatures are just a few degrees below freezing. Before Christmas I could practically go outside barefoot in this weather.

Lessons Learned

I blame it on that week in California. When you live in a cold place, it is just too much of a shock to your body to go to a really warm spot for a week then immediately return to the cold. As wonderful as it seems at the time, it is just too confusing for all of the blood vessels, capillaries and internal organs. Maybe I will write a letter to the Island’s Chief Medical Officer and suggest a Provincial ban on all of those Spring Break trips from Charlottetown to Cuba, the Dominican and Florida. It could save a lot of Islanders the misery and expense that I’ve recently endured.

I know that next time we plan a winter trip south to warm up, we’ll be thinking of sunny southern North Dakota or perhaps Upstate New York. We’ll probably drive.