by Josep Pla
Gray mullet often live side by side with sea bass. Generally speaking, mullet isn’t highly rated, it always likes mud and one can taste the poor quality of its often wretched diet. However, there are many kinds of mullet: there are freshwater mullet in ponds and rivers. This fish indicates the great variety one can find within the same species. It’s a similar situation with roger – red mullet – which is called moll in Barcelona and other parts of the coast and rouget in French. Red mullet is so delicious. It is one of the highest points in marine cuisine. I think everyone would agree it is a good fish. Obviously, it’s always a vexed issue when one discusses what taste buds like and dislike. One could probably create a list of fish based on their objective qualities. It would be necessary, however, for most people to accept such a list. The question of position and hierarchy has always been a difficult, delicate source of contention. For example, I adore grilled sardines when they are fresh and plump. Others believe it to be a vulgar, commonplace fish. If a friend were to ask me what you should eat in May, I’d answer straightaway: thirty sardines per head, fresh out of the sea, fat, gleaming and grilled, and four tender local lamb chops with a spring salad seasoned with oil, vinegar, salt and mustard. That makes a total of thirty-four items. That’s a goodly number. Accompany the sardines with a dry white claret, made from Macabeo grapes from L’Escala, and the chops with a mellow red, and you see how they just slip down…
Red mullet is a high-grade fish, but you must apply immortal principles based on experience when choosing your fish. There are at least five kinds of red mullet that I know of, even though I know nothing – and not forgetting the huge ignorance that exists when it comes to the sea and fish. The variety of types in nature can’t be pinned down. Besides, nature tends to fake its products constantly. Many fish have their ersatz: the common squid is a substitute for the veined squid; the John Dory, an ersatz sole; there is an infinite variety of gray mullet, most of which are worthless, but the red-cheeked gray mullet and the rock mullet, at specific times in the year, and always with an element of good will, rival the excellent sea bass. There are also many kinds of sea bass, some of which, like silt and estuary sea bass, are frankly inferior; others are top of the range. Whenever possible, I think it’s a good idea to dispense with these obsequious, servile fish that aim to imitate the refined class. It’s a sorry business replacing veined squid with common squid, or sole with John Dory…Sometimes, it’s difficult, because one’s purse doesn’t stretch that far. We poor people have to be extremely patient and often have no choice but to use the fakes created by nature. It sometimes seems that nature and capitalism have signed an eternal pact of friendship…
So then there are five kinds of red mullet. Does that mean there are five different species of these fish? I don’t think so. The category of red mullet depends on where it lives and what it eats. It’s a very active, rather stupid, highly carnivorous fish – lobsters also eat meat if they can find any – and it digests in an immobile, dreamy state, drowsing on sand. However, at dawn or sunset, it emerges from its slumbers and driven by hunger throws itself into a hunt for food, abandoning all balance, caution and common sense. As if blinded by hunger it enters a state of frenzy. If, on its travels, it comes across a fine-mesh net, it attacks it without thinking twice and commits suicide, an inglorious, unlamented suicide. Such is the life and death of a red mullet. There are less tasty fish that are infinitely more intelligent.
As we said, the category of a red mullet depends on where it lives and what it eats. There may be cases – this is a hypothesis – when a red mullet of good stock, one of those first-rate specimens they call juliolencs in Tossa de Mar, perhaps the best along our coast, migrates from its group, abandons its family and ancestral watery pastures and goes to live with red mullet of a different class, like the prodigal son. In such cases, don’t pin your hopes on that red mullet. Its qualities are suddenly diluted. It takes on another color. It becomes another kind of fish. Seventy years ago, materialists declared with impressive gravitas: “Man is what he eats.” That could be said, and much more reasonably, of red mullet.
There is a lower class of red mullet – the so-called ombradiu or shadowy mullet – that is found in less than clean waters in commercial ports or spots near fishing villages, and it’s a greenish hue. Then there is the mud-loving mullet that trawlers catch very deep down; a small, pinkish mullet with a long, narrow head and thin scales. It’s what they feed you in rural boarding houses and taverns and, of course, in big cities. It’s not very nice. Red mullet that live near sand or seaweed are tastier and plumper, their flesh firmer. This progression in quality really runs parallel to the quality of their watery habitat, and it’s a well-known fact that the saltier the water, the better the fish that swim there. Shadowy mullet live in water that isn’t very salty, in waters professors and naturalists call – excuse my pedantry – lentic. Top red mullet, the glory of the species, the aristocrats in the family, live near seabeds where there is sand, seaweed and rocks – that is, swim in areas of white coral reefs, where you’ll often find lobsters. Such are the juliolenc in Tossa, the one on the Torroella coast and the one in the waters of Begur. When you encounter a large red mullet with a round head, strong rough scales and strong compact slices of flesh, you know it is top class. Don’t hesitate for a moment. The bigger, the better. Grill them with a drop of vinegar. They’re also good with garlic and parsley. Moreover, the cooking process will enhance their colors. Red mullet on the bottom rungs of the ladder will turn a wan pink on the flame. Conversely, the best red mullet will turn an intense, sumptuous cardinal red, that red we all know, which is so like the immortal reds Velázquez used in his portrait of Pope Innocent X in Rome’s Galleria Doria.
Mullet sport a beard. Their beards look like small, vibrating hooks, which they use to scratch the sea floor where they live. Mullet use their beards to eat. Well-respected gentlemen may also use their beards to the same end.
The best fish soup is the one made from a burra, of the sole family, which are called somera on some parts of the coast. It is a small, black, round flatfish, a bit larger than a silver five-pesseta coin, with lots of bones. In itself it is inedible, but when boiled in a broth, it produces the most intense, delicate-flavored soup any fish can provide. Generally speaking, the best fish in the sea are those that least taste of fish, those that don’t give your stomach the unpleasant turn you get from the smell of fish in the market, or fish when it’s being salted, or even an empty fish box. Burra soup is the soup that least smells of fish of any that you can make. A rich soup can also be made from the broth of those long, multicolored fish that go by the name of tub gurnard or, in some places, shortfin or naked-belly sea robin. It brings such an intense, subtle taste to the palate, which is what one expects from a good soup.
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I can’t seriously claim I have ever been a fisherman – of the professional or amateur variety. However, even though I’ve never established myself in the terrain in my own right, it is undoubtedly true that I have helped to catch lots of fish.
I began conscientiously, the way things should begin if you want to do things properly: I began by learning to pull on a line. At the time, dragnet fishing was practiced in Aiguablava, a beach in Fornells Bay with very fine sand and no reefs. Dragnet fishing is a nighttime activity, and as I’ve always liked going to bed late, I discovered it was quite in tune with my character. It was wonderfully elemental and easy! The skipper on land gave us a loop of rope – a grommet – which was attached to one of the dragnet’s pull ropes. And it was all about walking along and pulling on the rope with the loop over your shoulder until it was all out and then starting back from the water’s edge. As this kind of fishing was usually practiced by the poorest men and women around, people have expressed doubts as to whether it was they who kept the rope tensed or whether it was the rope that stopped them from falling over. They were excellent men and women – people who’d never had an opportunity
to reach a minimal degree of respectability or had lost it with the passage of time. They weren’t fishing folk: they were simply the rock-bottom poor, the out-and-out, genuine misérables.
My God, what nights they were! Dragnet fishing – like all operations that use light – was a nocturnal activity in periods of darkness. It commenced with the old moon and finished with the moon in the sea. When the moon was full, people enjoyed a break and disappeared from the beach.
On dark nights, under the high cliffs over the cove, Aiguablava became a pitch-black grotto. The shadows were dense. Often, in the distance, you could see the boat with its sad speck of damp luminous yellow hanging in the blackness of the bay. If there was the slightest swell, the light hopped and skipped so comically it made you weep. The old light from pinewood sparking in iron braziers had been replaced by acetylene. The beach sometimes stank unpleasantly of calcium carbide. When it was dry and the sky was twinkling, the acetylene gave out a white-to-bluish glow; on damp, misty nights it turned a fine yellowish red. While we waited for the moment to loosen the rope – that is, the moment to let out the net – the beach was profoundly silent, a silence scented by an intense aroma of pine and seaweed. Sometimes we saw a vaguely human form wandering around holding a poor, spluttering lamp. The silence was so total it felt theatrical.
The boat with the acetylene lamp, in which the dragnet skipper had embarked, was moored between two boats with lights. The lamp would go in search of fish. Nothing is dogmatic in the fishing world. If the lamp discovered a shoal of blue fish, sardines, anchovies, chub, horse or common mackerel, it tried, making the least noise possible, to lure it closer to land. If the attempt looked as if it might work – which was always difficult to predict – someone would signal with a green lamp to the person in charge on the beach. It was all about coaxing the fish to the beach shallows. When the signal was given, the biggish boat was moored, leaving one rope on land, which, in turn, pulled the net under the water so as to leave its sack behind the boat with the lamp. Once the sack was closed, the biggish boat brought the other rope to the beach. When this operation was concluded, the sack was dragged as far as the breakwater. With the loop of rope over your shoulder you then walked up the beach into the thickest of shadows beneath the front line of pine trees. By the water the sand was damp; it then became fine – sand dust – and pleasantly and warmly tickled the soles of your feet.
There were two ropes: the southwesterly rope and the easterly rope. The orientation of our coast, from Cape Creus to Alfacs, is marked by the path of the winter sun. East is the rising sun and southwest the setting sun. These points of reference are the touchstones when it comes to locating yourself on our shores. The net would be slowly dragged toward land. Sometimes a crazed, dazzled fish jumped under the light. In the incandescent, metallic water, the fish made bubbles that rose from the depths and died on the surface, like lips melting in their own breath.
It was imperative to keep the cork float around the mouth of the net in a vertical position behind the lighted boat. Sometimes the southwesterly rope would be pulled harder than the easterly one or vice versa and the net’s mouth appeared to curl and snarl. If the easterly rope was pulled too hard, a man on the lighted boat shouted through hands cupped like a loudspeaker, shattering the deep silence over sea and beach:
“Pull southwester…!”
Responding to that solemn cry, an elongated shout came up from land:
“Southwester it is…!”
“Pull southwester…!” the voice on the lights boat often repeated, trying to straighten the net.
“Southwester it is…!” answered the beach.
The resonant drawn-out phrases, like the end of a psalm, slowly vanished into the shadows, as if disappearing into the water.
“Pull easterly…!” the gruff, distant voice suddenly bawled from the sea.
“Easterly it is…!” cried those on land.
Those pulling on the easterly rope with the coil round their shoulder upped their effort, bent their backs, sank their bare feet into the sand.
As the sack of the net drew nearer to land, curiosity was piqued. It would have been an exaggeration to speak of emotions. Those people were too downtrodden to feel emotion. That belonged to past, ravaged things.
The sack landed full of water, like a monstrous black excrescence. However, once on the soft sand, it soon deflated. If there were no fish, it lay like a dark, tired, dead blotch under the white light from the lamps. In that situation, people ran their hands over their shoulders, yawned and ate a hunk of bread. But there was always something or other. The fish died – it was a net for catching blue fish – in a series of frantic convulsions that created a stream of diamond-like droplets of water. Those frenzies were short-lived: our eyes were bewitched by the glitter. Then we opened the sack and saw the fish, a mass of molten silver, still alive, a glittering blue and tremulous light green. Like all fish that swim in shoals, they died in line, gregariously, as if anchovies had had a premonition of their jars and sardines of their boxes. You could watch the last gasp as they choked, the sad grimace of their final flourish. Then the surface of the blue fish was covered in that sticky, colloidal film that covers living beings in water, which slipped through your fingers and gleamed mournfully.
I tried my hand at many other things. I joined in a lobster campaign in the channels off Fornells. We fished with creels, often at quite a depth. There are infinite ploys that can be used with those wicker baskets, inside which bait was hung. Fish are generally hungry, and when driven by hunger, they are blinded and commit suicide. It is easy to go into a creel and difficult to get out. There are huge creels to catch the amazing spring conger eels. There are creels for lobsters and smaller mushroom-shaped ones, called prawn creels, which catch many different kinds of fish. The best bait for prawn creels is the female sea urchin. Lobsters eat all kind of bait, fresh or salted.
Creels must be dropped in suitable places, and to know where they are, you need a clear, or at least approximate, idea of the underwater orography. It is vital to have a precise knowledge of depths. Besides that, you must be able to feel those depths in the palm of your hand – namely, by being sensitive enough to feel that small, often barely perceptible bump made by something thrown into the sea when it touches the seabed. You must have that sensitive touch even if a creel descends one hundred twenty fathoms. Those places are determined by the lay of the land, because everywhere in a coastal sea is a product, the vertex, of an angle drawn by specific land formations. It is futile to lower lobster pots onto sand, seaweed or mud: you won’t catch a thing. Fish – every kind of fish – live in their own geographical habitat. In the months when you are allowed to fish them, lobsters live in the sides of underwater mountains, in the valleys and hollows within those mountains, in rocky or stony areas covered in bushes of deep-sea seaweed. The signs that point up fishy zones are often known to fishermen via the oldest family traditions, by empirical detail accumulated by their forebears. The only wealth many fishing families possess is the knowledge of these indicators, sometimes recorded in a notebook, sometimes preserved not so accurately by memory. However, knowledge of all these connections is fading, and will in the end be lost. Human life is being mechanized.
The hunger fish feel isn’t that languid hunger some humans feel. It is blind, frantic, active hunger. When fish are hungry, they start swimming, they rush around in search of potential food and tend to ignore obstacles. At such times, their sight fails them, their wily, beady gaze is gone. Nets are there to take advantage of such moments of madness. There are many kinds to catch sardines, sand smelt, bogues; fine mesh, long and wide. And many others.
Fish go hunting for food – like most animals – twice a day: at the break of dawn, as the song goes, and at dusk, as the sun is setting. That is the ominous time when a net must be sunk and ready. Fish circulate, swim by, swerve, cleave the water like spears, turn around and, eyes clouded by the hint of prey, are
caught in the net.
Nets must be set down in strategic places because the hunger that drives fish crazy to the point of killing themselves never makes them stray from their usual habitat. Nets are dropped to cover their pastures, small coastal straits, the bottoms of cul-de-sacs, and the mesh must be strong and resistant; holes must be mended and suitably tinted. They must be lowered following the twists and turns of underwater rocks, because straight lines are few and far between in nature, and they must be brought up at the right time. They must never be left indefinitely in the water but be raised at turning points – namely, at dawn or dusk. If not, every fish caught in the net will ineluctably be devoured by predators. A sucking, gasping fish is on track to becoming defenseless prey.
Nets capture the tastiest fish along our shores: scorpionfish, red mullet, hogfish…Animals with monstrous heads, eyes bulging as if they were about to have an instant heart attack. However, nets aren’t only dropped where the seabed is ridged and difficult; sardine nets are hung over sand in bays and gulfs to catch blue fish that are migrating…supposing they do migrate. These fish swim – or toil, as fishermen say – at the same time as other fish, but they can also do so at odd moments, when fascinated by a glimmer of light or chased by a hungry predator.
Dragging nets along the seabed, across sandy or muddy flats, along the floor of underwater ravines, is an ancient art. This kind of fishing used to happen only in winter, and would be carried out by pairs of fishing smacks. Each boat dragged the rope on the net, sailing windward or with a wind from land. Fishing smack skippers at the time were considered to be first-rate fishermen, the aristocrats of the trade. Their boats carried a lateen sail and a jib and, though they didn’t have keels, they resisted well in wintry weather. They were expertly handled. Moreover, the skippers had to be familiar with the underwater geography to avoid snagging their nets. Even the cleanest seabeds have potential snags: wrecks, rubbish, the tops of rocks where the net can catch. Apart from severely damaging the net, such snagging can lead to the loss of a whole catch. Land formations indicate the precise location of these perils. Trawlers have replaced those pairs of boats, and one boat now does the work of two. The two ropes of the net drop from the trawler’s poop and the mouth of the sack is kept open by two doors, pieces of wood the progress of the boat tends to separate, keeping the bag wide open. These highly seaworthy boats have keels and powerful engines and stand up to the sea phenomenally well. Trawled fish are excellent, especially in winter, but apart from a few specific species – like monkfish, for example – they can never rival species that feed in less muddy spots, that receive more light and coastal sun.