The article about eels in the last
newsletter prompted Andrew Rutter to
send me this amusing family story and
sketch which he has kindly agreed to
share with you.
Dear Sheila,
When my mother was first married
in the 1920s, she joined the
Shaftesbury Rutter Clan, who went for
annual holidays to Sandbanks, where we
own a family boathouse and bungalow
with a garden full of pine trees.
They all went fishing and brought her a
huge conger eel that they
had caught and asked her to cook it for
supper. She tied it to a tree
branch and wrestled with it , trying to
get the skin off – without any success.
She got so infuriated that she
cut it up and cooked it, skin and
all. In the evening she was
rebuked,
“You could have poisoned the lot of us!”
She was much more at home cooking
traditional Cornish pasties which
smelt delicious! Very different from Ginsters pale
modern offerings.
As you will have gathered, I have
received the latest Newsletter and I
thank you for using my drawing of the
eel house at Alresford.
Wish best wishes, Andrew
