by Josep Pla
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There is much more to say about fish in Fornells.
We were talking about mullet, and mullet is one thing and forkbeard another. Mullet, caught by rock faces, are top rate; forkbeards are lured into creels. The forkbeard is a deep-sea fish, and when it comes to the surface and meets much lighter pressure in the atmosphere, it swells apoplectically, dramatically inflating with air. Atmospheric pressure is relative: an excess kills many animals; a lack of pressure kills deep-water fish. A forkbeard is dark gray with a vaguely ferrous tint on its slimy, colloidal skin. Its flesh is on the bland side, but a slice fried and accompanied by a tomato, pepper, onion and escarole salad makes for the loveliest summer breakfast imaginable. If you wake early one day and toil for a few hours, the moment will come when you’ll really fancy breakfast. A dozen – or two – grilled sardines are a welcome prospect. However, a breakfast of sardines on a sweltering summer morning, when a bumblebee is buzzing a few feet away, induces a sense of being stuffed. In a benign climate that is so devilishly predictable, sardines make you sleepy, stiffen your joints, sap your will. Your touch becomes haphazard and images turn lascivious. A breakfast of sliced forkbeard is infinitely lighter, if not as tasty; in any case, much subtler.
Creels can catch conger eels, spiny lobsters and llobregants – the common lobster – which are called llongants or llobegants on other parts of the coast and homards in French. If you want to follow my advice, cut a conger into thick slices and ignore the tail, which is too bony for human consumption. This sea snake is always good to make a substantial, if frankly insipid, rice dish. It tastes its best in the spring. Then slices of conger, cooked with tender, sweet Fornells peas, constitute an objectively delicious meal. Human malice tends to pass off the moray – another sea snake – as a conger, or at least as its ersatz. It’s an abominable comparison. Apart from the fact that they are two quite distinct fish, one can’t compare their quality. The conger is the color of sinuous, slippery, snaky things: its skin is streaked white and gray, an almost bluish gray. Whenever painters want to create an image of a fleeting form, they must have recourse to the thin sinuous cylinder of a conger eel, the color of which is but a faint hint in water. A moray is a very dark, earthy color dotted with yellow and gold spots. It is a fish that belongs in gloomy hollows, dark caverns, a malign beast, like a handful of gold coins lurking at the bottom of a secret vase.
In the age-old dispute between supporters of the common lobster and supporters of the spiny lobster, the former always win out, as shown by the difference in price these crustaceans fetch in the market. Although spiny lobsters are rarer than the common variety, they are always cheaper. No sight is more scintillating than a creel of common lobsters rising to the surface. These crustaceans convulse, shake their tails, spasmodically jump, beat their breasts, bend their erect, vibrating legs over the coils of their body. The noise their drumming makes sounds like something hollow, as if the flesh they contain were separating from their pink shells. But they usually subside, let themselves be covered by a cloth and reach the tank full of life. It is best not to keep male and female together in the tank, because they sometimes kill one another. They must be kept separate, though that’s not so easy because it’s generally hard to guess the sea creatures’s sex. When they surface captive, common lobsters aren’t so frenzied; they are stronger and, consequently, more self-confident. They die all the same. The issue as to which crustacean is more delicious is a matter of taste. Both have arguments in their favor. The homard’s flesh is sweeter and softer, the spiny lobster’s more compact and firmer. In my humble opinion, they must be eaten grilled, passed over embers, with a light vinaigrette, that should be slightly stronger for a spiny lobster. No sauces. It’s wrong to boil them: boiling destroys their divine essence, their spirit, transforms them into something vegetable, passive and diluted. Only embers and a grill enable the aroma to be retained on the toasted, calcareous shell.
The great family of scorpionfish – with their monstrous, apoplectic heads, poisonous sting, bright reds, coagulated-blood reds and motley colors – produces, in a higher state of evolution, the circle of hogfish, which is one of the finest creations of the sea. The scorpionfish is a hungry, nay gluttonous, fish that is caught with small mesh nets: it has little edible appeal – except for making soup broth – because of a surfeit of bones. A hogfish, on the other hand, is first rate: it is good however it’s cooked: boiled, stewed in its juices or casseroled. It can be caught with hooks on a long line, or with a trammel net. The true adepts of eating fish – who are few and far between – think that a hogfish’s head and gills are out of this world.
Sea bream, white bream, goldline and big walleye are rock fishes that feed on the flora on the reefs and rocks near the surface that receive intermittent sunlight. Such pastures give them a rocky, rather bitter taste, which could only be described if a palate had clearly literary inclinations. In any case, one could establish a hierarchy between all those fish: perhaps the goldline is poorest in quality, the one with the rockiest flavor. It’s highly entertaining to see a shoal of goldline devouring the vegetation on a reef, churning the water, making it simmer, as the lightning fish turns on the blue of its back and then on its silvery belly. Fishermen catch them with casting nets and use them as bait on longlines or rod lines. Dentexes also like them. They too can be caught at dusk, on a corkline baited with sea lice or hooks with bread pellets that are left to drift.
Perhaps white bream should be ranked at the top of this hierarchy; it is better than dentex in my view because it tastes so much fresher. Pink bream is also delicious, especially if it is on the weighty side. It’s very likely that the pink tone of this fish – a marble pink when it comes out of the water – is the most refined, delightful pale red that exists on this planet. Both breams are good prepared in whatever way and are quite unrivaled. The other rock fish I mentioned a moment ago are nothing out of the ordinary but can act as a worthy accompaniment to greens at dinner.
One could say a lot about king prawns, cuttlefish, langoustines and crayfish. These crustaceans are fished here by trawlers dragging a net across a muddy or sandy seabed. The quality of their flesh varies a lot according to the area where they feed. If their flesh is muddy, crumbly and pasty, they cannot be compared to those bred in pure, fast-flowing water, which helps produce a hard shell and compact flesh. It is crucial for fish to be fresh; environment is key to quality. A poem by the Rector of Vallfogona has been preserved and is dedicated to “the wild dragon of Tortosa, the symbol of the city’s guild of fishermen…” It is one of the few poems in Catalan that adjectivize fish.
Fleshy pompano,
tender, milky mullet
and compact sole,
with sinuous conger eel.
Rowing lobster,
Goliath crab,
inky squid
and silvery scad.
Freckled moray,
gilded bream,
with mother-of-pearl langoustine,
and glassy corba.
From freshest mullet
to driest, saltiest bass…
There are three kinds of adjective in this list: the totally gratuitous, the approximate and the precise. The latter – the “tender, milky mullet” – relates to fish that live in muddy waters, to the species in the estuaries of the River Ebro, to pinpoint their habitat exactly.
I’m suggesting by all this that crustaceans are at their best when they are stiff and firm rather than limp and flaccid.
They are used to give flavor to rice, and that’s fair enough, but they are much tastier grilled with a dash of olive-oil vinaigrette. In my opinion they are never on par with the common or spiny lobster.
The spider crab is a wonderful crustacean that can sometimes be caught in the spring, when laying its eggs near the waterline on empty beaches. It can also be caught with a trawling net or creel: a spider crab is
like an upturned pot, a raw-red beast that walks using its joints like a system of levers. Fans of the shelly species say the spider crab is the best of all the crabs caught around here. That might be taking it too far. Though it is a large creature, it is home to scant flesh, more a figment of the imagination than real, but those who are adept at scouring the shell – that is an art like any other, an anatomical dissection like any other – maintain that the flesh you do find in the shell cannot be surpassed. When they speak of grilled spider crab, their eyes almost pop out of their sockets. Also, when good weather comes, rice with spider crab has a very good press, with a scattering of freshly picked peas, the right sauce, not too dark, to the point that I have heard people claim it’s one of the best rice dishes there are. It adds a strong, concentrated flavor to things and leaves a sweetish aftertaste that’s certainly surprising and original on the palate. At any rate the spider crab is one of the most delicious elements that spring brings to our coast, although it’s often forgotten nowadays.
Hake fishing along our shores has entered what may be a terminal phase. Hake used to be fished with special longlines a long way out to sea. It’s an excellent fish and much liked, particularly inland. It has little in the way of fishy odors and is easily dissected because its bones are transparent, and so it’s become the ideal fish for people who don’t really like fish. Hake is a fey, twilight animal; it belongs to the menus of convalescents, of individuals who can eat very little, and those who stay in inns and taverns in our country: commercial travelers and fly-by-nights. One of the things that make traveling so sad in this country is being forced to eat round hake steaks every day, accompanied by a leaf of escarole. The decline in hake fishing means it is quite hard to say if there is a lot of hake in our waters. In Barcelona they’ve tried to invent a kind of “quality hake,” which usually refers to hake fished on a longline, but in reality they’re catching the fish with trawlers. As a result, there are a lot more consumers of so-called longline hake than longline hooks cast into the sea.
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The last few days of March. As part of the starry, rather cold fascination of those spring nights in Fornells, I watch the twinkling white lights switch on in the longboats, the trainyeres, that had disappeared from sight in October. Their appearance in the monotony of Fornells life is such a novelty that everybody is quite astonished by those fleeting, errant glimmers. People talk for a good two hours about those lights that keep me company and excite those who do business from the sea. Money, money, money…
A man in a group sitting by the line where they hang nets up to dry or mend tells us about his thoughts on sardines.
“Those people in the longboats will make a pile. Now’s the time when huge shoals enter through the Strait of Gibraltar and swim up the peninsular coast, with a southwesterly wind, the Lenten wind, as far as the Gulf of Lion. This mass of fish, sometimes instinctively, sometimes fleeing from predators, swims along the line of the coast as far as the sea of Genoa. Then, in late summer, the beginning of autumn, sardines and anchovies follow the reverse route. As the sun dips, they come down the coast, always searching for pleasant water temperatures, through the straits and off to warmer, tropical seas. Such are the perceptible migratory moments of sardines, anchovies and perhaps blue fish in this country,” says the fisherman. “As they move up and down, these shoals never reach the coast of Italy. That’s why Italian farmers who want to eat good saltwater fish must buy it here…By the time the fish reach the coasts of the Italian Riviera, the water is too cold and they turn back…”
What do we know about sardines? We know nothing. Biologists have struggled to unravel the mysteries of the life of blue fish, to track their precise habitat, yet to this day haven’t come up with anything clear. Is it a migratory fish that moves from one area to another, driven by currents, winds and dangerous predators? Only doubts exist on that front. Is it an animal that goes intermittently from waters near the surface to the hidden depths of the sea? I mean, does a blue fish migrate vertically? Does it swim from top to bottom or from left to right? According to the latest studies there are masses of local blue fish that are sedentary and reproduce in places that have nearby pastures, independently of the huge shoals that migrate. So the results from these studies are nonexistent: we know nothing at all.
One placid summer afternoon I climbed the coast by the Cape Creus lighthouse and saw the largest shoal of sardines I had ever seen. At the surface of the water it occupied an area of over three hundred square yards and constantly changed shape. It was a mass of fish turning in on itself, a cosmic silvery-blue swarm suspended beneath the surface, touched by the setting sun, drifting with the wind – a light southeasterly – and the waves, which were monotonous, mechanical and persistent. The drone of a southwesterly…The shoal was visible for hours, indolent and passive, before it finally disappeared into the shadows of twilight. If a predator had appeared – tuna, dentexes, not to mention dolphins – that entire mass would have been terrified, become self-aware, and fled in seconds. But where would they have fled to? Horizontally? Vertically? From top to bottom, from right to left? Do we have a clue? We may really know nothing after all…
On tranquil nights, from the light boat of a longboat – where I often happened to be as a recalcitrant bird of the night – one can often see small bubbles in the illuminated area of water; they rise from depths perceptible to the eye, like points of a needle crossing the glaucous mass, eager to reach the surface. Some reach the waterline exhausted; some are livelier, iridescent, glinting with life. Those bubbles are evidence of the existence of fish at a lesser or greater depth, near the sea floor. The fish are fascinated by the light and come to the surface; sometimes, despite the attraction of the lights, the fish remain invisible in an unknown zone. In the first instance, the fish wants to die bewitched by the movement of the trainyera. When that is the case, there are multiple signs of fish. First, isolated sardines swim through the water like tiny crazed snakes; sometimes they splash furiously above the waterline. Those first sightings increase until a shoal coalesces under the light, a swarming mass in translucent waters.
So then, sardines – and blue fish generally – live intermittently at the bottom of the benthos and in plankton zones. Naturalists use these two words to name the two essential elements of marine geography. The bottom of the sea as a whole, from the coastal plain to the abyssal depths, composes the benthic system. The waters supported by the seabed make up the pelagic system. Creatures of the benthos live in the former and plankton in the latter. In the former there are mainly underwater flora and small living organisms, while fish live in the latter.
The penetration of light creates another division as regards these two systems. First, there is the diaphanous zone, which is affected by the penetration of sunlight; then there is the aphotic or shadowy zone, unreached by the rays of the sun. How far down do sunbeams penetrate? Apparently, sunlight has made an impact on photographic plates at depths of between five hundred and a thousand yards. In reality, however, from two hundred yards the strength of light becomes so weak and the density of the water offers such resistance to penetration that vegetable life dwindles at an astonishing rate. It doesn’t stop entirely: it becomes scant, and a large part of the benthic platform is formed by sand or viscous slime.
In Fornells we thought that mullet belonged to the benthos, but to its diaphanous zone. We attributed the fish’s bright colors to the fact that its scales were touched by the light of the sun. On days when the water was still and limpid, we would see them motionless and sleepy eyed above the sand between two mounds of seaweed, as if they were listening to a lecture. They sometimes stayed there for hours until they started to swim at dusk. Naturalists tend to give light a key role in underwater life. It is remarkable that fish usually swim at the sun’s two critical moments: dawn and dusk. In any case explaining the color of fish by their contact with light would occasionally make us look foolish. How could you expl
ain the pink, delightful red of the blackbelly rosefish we caught with kite-fishing lines at a depth of two or three hundred fathoms?
Similarly, we believed that forkbeards, monkfish and soles belonged to the benthos and its aphotic zone. Their dark, muddy hue, their flattened shape, which we attributed to the pressure of the water, and the stupid airs suggested by their flat form led us to believe they had never wallowed in sunlight. We thought their scope for movement was small, that their swimming organs were scant and feeble. But what did we really know about these creatures? Soles do not abound along our coast, but it would be wrong to think there are none. Sometimes when a storm stirs the sea, the odd one is caught not in areas of rocks and seaweed but in zones of mud and sand. This means that soles can live at a depth, and can live there all the time, because it hasn’t been proven that when they are caught by the coast it is the egg-laying season. No. It can happen at any time of the year. Now, as soles are always the same color, whether caught in the diaphanous or aphotic zone, we had ineluctably to conclude that our knowledge about them was pure hypothesis, devoid of consistency or evidence. Sole is ersatz brill. Brill is a high-quality fish: it isn’t as muddy colored as sole, it is darker, stronger, more intense.