Smoked eel is about as good eating as you can get. Jellied eel is also very good if you can get beyond the site LOL....it looks NASTY....but is really very tasty. Unagi and Anago are both also delicious and among the most popular fish in most sushi places. Smoking them is my favorite but I LOVE smoked fish...nothing better with beer, in my opinion. Seriously, they are thick in most southern river systems, easy to catch...fight pretty good, and are very easy to smoke...it is a shame more people don't take advantage of them.
The blood is most definitely toxic if consumed uncooked. Very few mammals will intentionally eat a raw eel. I am certain it happens unintentionally or opportunistically but those mammals who do so most often suffer severe anaphylaxis effects and, if severe enough, will die. The use of toxins derived from eel blood was used in France in the 1890s to develop the process used today to immunize and treat food allergies. If cooked eel blood is harmless...it is easily metabolized in the digestive process.....but uncooked it was used to inject dogs to induce death and then smaller doses administered to dogs to develop a tolerance. It will do the same thing in Humans and was indeed responsible for many deaths in Europe many years ago when they didn't have the science to understand why. It is not overly dangerous to handle but some folks do have a reaction to coming in contact with it....burning, itching, etc. The slime can also cause this reaction in some people. Those people would probably be very succeptible to having a severe reaction to raw eel blood. Just like wasp stings and peanuts they don't kill everyone, symptoms differ from person to person and incident to incident, but all those kinds of toxins can and do kill people from time to time.
