Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [160]
Pilchards have always been a Cornish speciality, swimming to their northern limit at one time in great shoals, leaving the younger sardines behind.
‘The least fish in bigness, greatest for gain, and most in number is the pilchard,’ says Richard Carew, in his Survey of Cornwall (he became High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1586). The picturesque fishery of Elizabethan times that he described continued unchanged until the beginning of this century. It was quite as exciting as the Mediterranean fishing of sardines and anchovies, which takes place more romantically – for the spectator at least – in darkness, with the aid of flaring lamps which attract the fish.
When the shoals were expected, ‘between harvest and Allhallowtide’, boats with seine nets would ‘lie hovering upon the coast’. The masters turned their eyes towards a man stationed on the cliffs, sometimes in a special tower or towered house like the one at Newquay. This was the Huer. It was his job to direct the boats when he saw the dark red shadow approaching, by making a hue and cry with a loud voice, ‘whistling through his fingers, and wheazing certain diversified and significant signs with a bush which he holdeth in his hand. At his appointment they cast out their net, draw it to either hands as the shoal lieth or fareth, beat with their oars to keep in the fish, and at last either close and tuck it up in the sea, or draw the same on land with more certain profit, if the ground be not rough of rocks.’ There would be several waves of boats, each with their seine nets drawn round as much of the shoal as possible. On shore the country people waited with their horses and baskets; so did the merchants who would ‘greedily and speedily’ seize the major part of the catch.
Daniel Defoe describes the general excitement in Dartmouth in 1720 when a shoal was sighted – ‘the town was all in a kind of an uproar’ – and the dinner of fresh pilchards, grilled simply with pepper and salt, that cost the whole party no more than three farthings.
When my husband was a child at the beginning of the century, pilchards were brought round to the village near Looe by a man with a cartload of spanking fresh fish, but the main concern had for centuries been the export trade. Pilchards would be salted and pressed and barrelled for France, or salted and smoked for hotter countries like Italy and Spain. Local people would pickle the fish in rather different ways for their own use. They might bake them in a marinade of spiced vinegar like the soused herring on p. 201. For more immediate use, some of them were split and hung up in the open air to dry for a couple of days like the wind-dried and rizzered haddock of Scotland (p. 149). With a nice skill in judging weather and humidity, the fish would be taken down ‘in the very nick of time’ and put in pairs, skin sides out, on a gridiron over the fire, to roast or ‘scrowl’. The insides were well peppered first, just as Defoe ate them.
I am a little suspicious of the first recipe, perhaps unfairly, but am keeping it in the book because it tastes good.
HOW TO PREPARE SARDINES AND PILCHARDS
As for herring. Some people do not clean out sardines before they grill them, and indeed it can be a fiddly job unless you are good with a hairpin or the point of a small knife at hooking the guts out through the gills. They look raggedy if you slit them with a knife to clean them: scissors do a neater job, but even so they are rarely tidy.
Pilchards, being larger, are easier, and I recommend the idea