In the BBC "Italy Unpacked" series, Italian chef Giorgio Locatelli makes his traveling buddy British art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon some sort of eel dish -- my most vivid memory of the whole series is Locatelli tying the eel to a faucet to peel it. Not sure I would eat it, either, but in a culture where meat protein is rare I can see why people do.
Haven't seen eel in any of the American cookbooks I've poked around in from the 1830s or so to 1861, although I think they were still eating it in England then. Not sure it sounds any worse than turtle soup, and that was certainly a thing (although mock turtle soup was more common, I'm thinking -- turtles seemingly got hard to find a lot of places!).