Prohibition and the garment strike in New York City are blamed for the low price of live eels on the New York market this week. This fact is of peculiar significance to thousands of readers of this newspaper because Eastern North Carolina fishermen ship thousands of pounds of live eels to New York market at Christmas time. In former years they have received 45 to 75 cents a pound for live eels. Their returns from the New York dealers this week will be considerably below the lower figure of former years.
But what has prohibition and a garment strike got to do with the price of eels? The answer is full of human interest. Italians, from time immemorial, have considered live eels the piece de resistance of their Christmas menu. No one knows—not even the Italians themselves—why they eat eels at Christmas. But big, fat, wriggly live eels are to an Italian what a turkey is to an American. The large Italian population in New York has regularly consumed all of the live eels shipped to that market at Christmas time.
Now within the past two or three years, Italians have largely replaced the Jews in the great garment industry in New York. The great garment strike in New York this winter has hit the Italian colony hard. New York’s Italian population hasn’t the money to pay fabulous prices for live eels for the Christmas dinner of 1921.
And then Prohibition. A lot of the eels from Eastern North Carolina are small eels, known as shoe string eels. They were formerly bought up by packers and delicatessen firms, smoked and sold as a relish to saloons. Every saloon had its lunch counter and smoked shoe string eels went well with a lunch washed down with imported beer. With the passing of the saloon went also the saloon lunch counter where smoked shoe string eels were always in demand. Likewise went the biggest market for this class of eels.
The garment strike and prohibition combined have therefore helped to unsettle the eel market. At the same time New York has more eels this week than ever before. Boats bult especially for the catching and transportation of eels on the St. Lawrence River and its Canadian tributaries have brought 275,000 pounds of live eels to Fulton Wholesale Fish Market in New York City last week. And that is another reason why our local fishermen will not bank such big checks for their eel catch this season.
From the front page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Dec. 23, 1921
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