EATING AND DRINKING

Beneath those same waves, the Mediterranean anchovy (seitó or anxova in Catalan), prospers. Above them, local fishermen, cooks and gourmands celebrate one of the most important culinary treats the big blue has to offer.

To understand their obsession, you must dive back millenia, to when the ancient Greeks first arrived on the Iberian peninsular establishing the nearby town of Empúries as one of their most important settlements and where they perfected the art of salting fish, quickly followed by the Romans who lost no time in establishing a garum factory. Garum was a much revered Roman salsa—the classical equivalent of Asian fish sauces like nam pla—that was used as a means of adding salty, savoury flavour to other dishes. The primary ingredient was the anchovies they fished out of these very waters, then salted, packed down in barrels and left to ferment until a heady, pungent brew had been procured.

The tradition continues, although not as a stinky fish sauce, but in the ritual. To this day when the catch comes into port it goes directly to a warehouse and is packed down in salt in heavy wooden barrels, where it is left to mellow and mature anywhere between six months and a year. Only then are they ready for a Catalan table. First desalinated in several changes of water, then filleted and de-boned, perhaps marinated in a little olive oil with fresh thyme and bay leaves before gracing the top of a crust of rustic bread rubbed with the flesh of a juicy ripe tomato. Ah, the dinner of champions. Or should that be Romans?

Well, fashions come and fashions go. And during the early Seventies, when nouvelle cuisine was making its mark in the form of the bizarre, rebellious and misinformed, simple pleasures like these took a back seat. Serious gourmands were making for the border for their gastronomic kicks and forgot, momentarily, the treasures of their own villages.

It was a short-lived melt-down, for had these silvery blue, slinky little fish not been a cult already, they soon would have been thanks to the culinary passions of one Jaume Subirós who took over the innovative Motel Ampurdán in Figueres in the late Seventies. He now also has the Almadraba Park Hotel, and both reserve a special place for the local delicacy on their menus, which they fish and salt themselves.

As time has gone by, L’Escala anchovies have quietly continued to enjoy the same status that might be accorded caviar or foie gras in other circles. Aficionados far from home speak of them with longing. Critics write poems and local food lovers will use nothing else, be they salted in barrels, bottled in oil, or butterflied fresh in the markets, dredged in flour, seasoned with salt and pepper and fried. What matters is that they come from L’Escala.

The rivalry between these and Cantabrian anchovies from the Bay of Biscay, which are a little less plump and a little more dark than the Mediterranean type, runs deep. It comes second only to the rivalry that exists between the major anchovy landing ports that run along the Costa Brava including Cadaqués, Palamós and Sant Feliu de Guíxols, each of which boast merits of their own.

Whichever of these one prefers, over the years, I have seen Catalan anchovies make converts of innumerable friends and acquaintances who had claimed they didn’t like them. And like most things in life, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I could, like their numerous fans, wax lyrical about the unique and commendable qualities of anchovies for pages. Or I could simply share their myriad ways of serving and cooking with them, and make converts of us all.