by Josep Pla
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The first days of June. Now is the time to go and enjoy some relaxed fishing. Yes, that’s what’s new: relaxed fishing. In this country, this month is the best month to live by the seaside and enjoy the delights of its murky mysteries. Becalmed seas and gentle winds are traditionally long and persistent in the summer months. The water is transparent, the immediate seabed visible and the sea’s texture flecked with wonderful, soft tints. It’s as if nature has grown tired of the contrasts and inconstancies of spring, and enters a period of comforting convalescence. The sun begins to warm, the light to dazzle; the body finds everything slightly disturbing. Wintry rigors give way to expansion. Everything takes on a sheen, a pertness – wants to affirm itself – in the fleeting vagaries of life on land. Not yet overwhelmed by summer’s oppressive heat, each day, swept by long, gentle winds, moves like a woman in love: like a series of transfigurations. Moonlit nights – the light of the moon on white walls glimpsed between olive trees – have a mysterious charm that sometimes seems secretive and sometimes, depending on your state of mind, incomparably uplifting and noble. Dark nights, under twinkling stars, vanish into the luminous blue. Then comes the heat and a thirsty yellow drapes the earth.
Now, the life of the sea is exciting in these summer months. It is the moment when fish come close to the shore to lay their eggs in clean, sunny, warm waters. The water is filled with dense life. It thickens with tiny beings and glows with phosphorescence at night. It is the moment when fish are in heat.
Lots of ploys have erotic origins and obey the implacably universal need to self-perpetuate, to which fish, like all live beings, are subject.
Like many animals, fish are sensitive to color. Farmers put blotches of white on their vines because they know that rabbits are scared by that color and instantly run off. That’s how they save the green tendrils on their vines and the early grapes.
If you drag a white cloth through an area of shallow water, you’ll see how octopuses – if there are any about – will wildly throw themselves on it, clutching with their sinister tentacles. Before they can let go of the cloth, they are so blinded by their frenzy they are easily caught. Squid are caught with the infantile lure of a snagline. The lure is a piece of shiny lead studded with nails. You keep it oscillating from the surface downward and the squid embraces the nails, covering the lure with its desperate body. There’s a sharp tug on the line and the fisherman simply has to pull up the line quickly. The faster he does so, the deeper the lure’s metal points will sink into the squid.
There have been interminable arguments about the edible qualities of squid. They generally live in beds of seaweed or sandbanks and are very sedentary; there are areas of the sea where you will infallibly catch squid. Be that as it may, these creatures have become important to life as we know it and to the menus of inland taverns. Some people think that a plate of fried squid is delicious. For people who care about smell, squid have the advantage of barely carrying a scent. However rubbery, squid can be improved by being stuffed. The best stuffing is minced pork. We should be grateful for the opportunities offered by a squid’s empty pouches. Some eat squid in its ink and even octopus with potatoes, when the going’s hard, after beating its flesh with branches to soften it up. These are dishes that must be seen as a last resort. Nature was so enthused by the act of placing squid in the sea that it created an imitation: the larger, wine-colored common squid. The common squid has a tendency to displace the better smaller squid from markets and tables for the same reason that good money is chased away by bad. On the other hand, young squid, like young octopus, with a good sauce (which requires patience to make) constitutes a delicious dish. The key lies in establishing a perfect osmosis between fish and sauce.
Both young squid and octopuses are highly sensitive to light and are fished in the summer, almost by chance, as they gather under the lights from longboats. These small beasts, especially in shallow waters, are dazzled by the incandescent blues of the fumes from the petrol and swarm to the surface in a daze. Modern theories in marine biology give a lot of importance to light in the lives of fish. I have only an amateur’s experience, but I also believe in the importance of light not only in the lives of fish but in all manner of lives. The attraction humans feel toward the light leads them to agglomerate in big cities with their bright lights. So then, there are two extremes: young squid and octopus are delicious. The rubber chewed on in taverns is common squid, the poor relative of the squid family; true squid should always be eaten stuffed…naturally, if the stuffing is of a high quality.
When it was this time of year and there was talk in Fornells of the need to eat a modest rice dish, the problem was sometimes quickly resolved. Cuttlefish give rice a pleasant taste. They’re huge, shapeless, monstrous animals, as stupid as squid, if not more so. They usually stay on the benthic platform. To defend itself, the cuttlefish has an orifice on what we might call its forehead that spurts out a liquid aimed at blinding any adversary. Squid do likewise with the dark ink they pour out, which turns the water murky and facilitates escape. But squid clearly occupy a higher rung on the biological ladder: they defend themselves with a smokescreen, like a modern army unit, and cuttlefish, with a spurt of clear, crystalline water. Its short legs hang down like the arms of the war wounded. Its roundish shape makes one think it is a squid manqué. However, it does make a tasty rice dish. End of argument.
When the weather is placid as now, you take a female cuttlefish, put it on the end of a piece of string and slowly drag it from a skiff along beach areas of sand and seaweed at a depth of no more than two or three yards. The female must be alive and the boat’s speed must move languidly to create the illusion that the animal has freedom of movement. And suddenly the show will begin: a male cuttlefish emerges from a thick forest of seaweed, swims above the ridge of an underwater dune, out of a rocky grotto, and frantically embraces the female cuttlefish, blinded by the most mindless of passions. The first day one sees such theater, one is so astonished by such a display of amorous appetite in nature that one almost forget to pull on the string. But as one becomes accustomed to the sight – as one’s experience of life deepens – the prospect of that plate of juicy rice quickly displaces any surprise or respect one might feel toward the mysteries of the cosmos. In brief, when one registers that the female cuttlefish has completely disappeared beneath the male, one quickly pulls the string and the male is easily caught. Then one throws the female back in and repeats the operation. There is often competition. It’s really infantile. It really couldn’t be more so. Eventually, any fisherman endowed with a sense of responsibility tires of such manipulation: he begins to feel he is living, like other beings located on a higher rung of the biological ladder, off a real female…however much it may be a female cuttlefish.
Something very similar happens with lobsters: if you are lucky and a female lobster enters your creel, you can be sure that all the male lobsters in the vicinity will pile in through the hole. That’s how you get the best hauls of these crustaceans. That was how we came to have a notorious problem in Fornells – since the sea was full of these beasts – and it was profoundly worrying: the problem of the longevity of lobsters in relation to their reproductive energy. The idea was abroad that a lobster weighing four hundred grams had reached a venerable, quite biblical age: four score years. That opinion is based on tradition; on the fact that some macaronic books state, a belief that fishermen hold, that lobsters grow only at the moment they shed their shells, something they do once a year. When they shed them, the crustaceans are left in their shirt, a short, pink-white shirt covered in a layer of sticky, viscous matter. If all that was true, the generative powers of a lobster would last for years, and it would imply a protracted youth. We would be in the presence of a really fortunate creature. However, in my opinion – without committing myself at all – lobsters don’t live so long. The idea that their shells are fixed and their bodies are variable has no basis i
n reality. They grow quickly. The struggle to survive in the sea is hard and predators are everywhere. Mutual consumption is everywhere in the sea, but that is why there is so much food on offer. Granted, fish are voracious. If they didn’t have that continuous obsession, they wouldn’t fall so easily into the simple traps set in the same places. But that obsession with food ensures reproduction and that abundant first course of ours. Lobsters live as long as the struggle allows in their environment: a few years. The issue is that, as these animals aren’t registered and look so alike, we mistake the children for their parents.
There were two or three noteworthy trident fishermen in Fornells. When darkness fell on calm days, they’d rig a light up at the back of their skiff and go out to do their reconnaissance along the coast. One man rowed slowly and silently, merely dipping the oars in the water. Another man, trident at the ready, leaning over the boat’s side, surveyed the illuminated seabed. The craft would skim the coast, enter caverns and most out-of-the-way corners, the light fantastically streaking the crags and pines that grew between rocks near the water. The floor of the sea was visible through the transparent mass of water. The light revealed small static underwater seascapes: beds of sand bedecked with tiny reddish dunes, bushes of shimmering seaweed, mysterious hollows, rocks covered in slimy moss, black, hirsute sea urchins, greenish limpets, bald crabs and mineral deposits. The fisherman went after one fish or another that was blissfully asleep – or at least immobile on the ground – in one corner or another of that seascape. Sometimes his body could be seen above the sand bed or between two rocks in a tiny opening; often only part of his body, as the other was hidden by a clump of seaweed or the shadows from a grotto. The presence of the light didn’t usually scare off the fish; rather, the light seemed to coax and hypnotize it.
Then, the moment came in the deepest silence to throw the fitora at the sleepy, motionless prey. The fitora is a trident that has been adapted. A trident can have three prongs; a fitora can have more or less. The prongs are on a long handle, a four- or five-yard-long pole, which can be lengthened – if the prey is farther down – by a rope attached to the handle. The fisherman grasped the handle in both hands and, standing up in the skiff, sent the trident hurtling at the fish’s body, throwing it forcefully, as if it were a javelin. You have to take into account errors caused by refraction in the water and that’s why you must have had lots of practice. Sometimes it went wrong, but if the fish was hit, then came the second step, the moment to be ferocious. Gritting his teeth, the fisherman finished off his prey by putting all his weight on the trident so the prongs penetrated its flesh. Then he hoisted the trident aboard as the writhing fish convulsed frenziedly and lashed its tail.
If that maneuver were carried out in the light of day, you can be sure that the hurling of the trident – fitora or trall – would have led to one or more sculptured poses: an Apollonian moment with great artistic potential. However, luckily or not, it is a night operation, helped by darkness, in places where access isn’t easy…
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Naturalists, collaborating with individuals involved in the agrarian economy, have classified birds according to the benefits those delightful creatures bring to agriculture. Some are very positive, in the sense that they destroy lots of parasites; others don’t destroy them, but their presence means that more parasites are devoured; others keep a balance between what they produce and what they destroy.
Classifying fish according to their quality on the palate – one more way of being generally useful – is much harder than classifying birds. Issues of personal taste are thorny. Firstly, because lots of people have never thought seriously about such matters, and many others have thought about them far too much and they can never agree, even with those who live next door. In the bland language of the schoolroom, it is often said that fish have their merits and their defects and the best are those whose merits outweigh their defects. But what exactly are these merits and defects? Establishing that: there lies the rub.
In my humble opinion, the best fish in our seas, in the Mediterranean, is what we call a “corball” in Catalan. It’s what naturalists call the black corvina, a blackish, long, broad fish with bluish tinges, that is fished most in the cherry season – May and June. It can be fished throughout the year, but that’s the best time – “cherry time, corvina time” as they say in Menorca. They can be fished by line and hook or with a three-net trawl. When it is put on the table, however it’s been prepared – roasted or grilled – not only does corvina not give off the smell that other fish usually do, particularly if they come by the dozen, but they hardly smell of fish at all. Everybody knows what I mean by a fishy smell; it’s the sensation of this particular flavor in the mouth, which is rarely pleasant, that’s why so few people really like fish. The fish in these waters that barely produces that taste or odor is the corvina, and that’s why I place it at the top of my list. My modest criterion is that a fish that hardly tastes of fish is impossible to beat.
Second in my classification would come the sea bass, also called “loup de mer” in the south of France, Italy and the north of Catalonia. And I’d put it there for the same reason I argued for the corvina, because it is not as “fishy” as other fish, although more so than the corvina. On the other hand, there are many kinds of sea bass and it is one of the fish that fall foul of lodging houses. So just as there is only one corvina, the good sort, there are many sorts of sea bass, and those with bland, stringy flesh are poor quality. Besides, the sea bass is a wily, cunning fish that is hard to catch, particularly in clean, flowing waters with readily available, healthy food. The sea bass with a soft, muddy, heavy taste that inhabits stagnant or murky water is almost worthless. The sea bass whose habitat is flowing water, the rocky coastline and places with good pastures does live large in my ideal league of delectable creatures.
I would put third the red scorpionfish, or hogfish on the north coast, or the fatter variety found on the south coast called “hen” on account of its color. The countless varieties of scorpionfish, of diverse colors, that live on our rocky coast are inedible because they are so bony. They are malign, monstrous fish. Conversely, they are excellent in a broth and, once boiled, produce broth for wonderful soup. What’s strange about the vast family of scorpionfish, which are often of such poor quality and which possess venomous sharp ridges that can leave nasty cuts, is that there is an excellent subset with few bones and exquisite flesh. The horrifying monstrous head, bulging eyes and incandescent red color conceal one of the best fish in these seas, although on the surface it seems only good to be painted. The hogfish is very unfishy and that’s the key.
My number four would be the grouper, a fierce, sedentary loner that usually inhabits the same rocky lairs and hollows. It is a powerful fish, with strong colors, a gilded black, splashed with yellow, that seems phosphorescent when it swims. A grouper head makes a fantastic rice dish; it gives real substance to soup. Grilled or roasted, it is succulent. The strange Spanish rhyme “De la mar el mero y de la tierra el carnero” – “From the sea the grouper, from the land, the ram” – is based purely on the rhyme, on the sound. The grouper isn’t the best fish and mutton isn’t the best meat. Who could ever compare lamb to ox, beef or some kinds of game? In fact, and always respecting their different traits, sea bass, wrasse and grouper should perhaps be placed at the same level. Of the three, the grouper is the one with the toughest exterior.
In Fornells they said that there are five kinds of mullet. And it is quite true. In any case, I’d definitely put mullet fifth in my listing. You can say the same about mullet or “roger” (“moll” on the west coast and in Barcelona) as we said about sea bass. It dislikes still or murky water, sandy or seaweedy beds, and thrives in flowing, clear waters with a strong current. Small, pale mullet that go in swarms are usually caught by trawlers dragging their nets over sandy seabeds and are next to worthless. Conversely, fat red mullet with a firm flesh under firm skin is really ta
sty, especially with a touch of light vinaigrette. It is, however, much fishier than the fish we have previously mentioned.
The Atlantic is the sea for sole. Atlantic sole is big, fine and thick. Mediterranean sole is smaller and can’t be compared in terms of size. Nevertheless, strangely enough, Mediterranean sole can be very tasty – even as tasty as Atlantic sole. When seasoned in the northern French style, it is excellent. It’s thinking in this vein that I’d place this fish sixth: objectivity demands that. Besides, it’s a fish that’s not very fishy, which is important.
In my modest opinion, these six fish constitute the lead group produced by this sea in terms of taste. In any case, I think that my criterion, by which the best fish is the one with the least taste, shouldn’t be dismissed. The fact that all can be eaten, to their advantage, with the simplest preparation – grilled – speaks in their favor. They resist the dry heat from the embers, and, indeed, improve as a result.
The fish that come in their wake – common bream, sea bream, white bream and dentex – are located on that frontier where qualities are balanced out by defects, and consequently, it is always best to prepare them with a sauce or garlic, onion and parsley, to improve their level. Cuisine, the art of transforming one thing into another, often at a higher level, must be the most suitable in these cases. There is no doubt whatsoever that simplest is best, but that is only true when the fish is at the highest level. The fish in the group we have described benefit from the most elemental preparation.
Naturally, there are other fish that taste delicious: grilled sardine, when it’s big and juicy, is unrivaled. In the pea season, a conger eel is an exceptional item. A fry up of sand eels is hard to beat. However, the quality of these fish is limited to particular times of year, especially spring. Mackerel with garlic and parsley, what more could you ask for? The truth is that when the blue fish’s moment has passed, it’s best left alone. They enjoy a wonderful moment and then fall by the wayside.