The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [17]
Detail of a map by Giacomo Cantelli entitled “Vizcaya is divided into four major parts,” from Mercurio Geográfico, Rome, 1696. Note that the gulf is labeled Mare di Basque, the Basque Sea. (Photography archive of the Untzi Museoa-Maritime Museum, San Sebastián)
With flair and imagination, the Basques have created great dishes out of even the least fleshy little creatures of their unfruitful Basque Sea: txangurro, the scrawny spider crab of winter; txitxardin, tiny baby Atlantic eel caught in the rivers, also in winter; antxoa, the spring anchovies; txipiron, small squid caught off the coast in the summer; and sardina, the fat summer sardines that were a specialty of the Bilbao area before the pollution that came with the industrial revolution.
Txipiron
Basque fishermen invented ways of cooking inexpensive local catch. Ttoro is a dish traditionally prepared by Labourdine fishermen based in towns at the mouth of the Nivelle: St.-Jean-de-Luz, Ciboure, and the village at the harbor entrance, Socoa. It is made from locally available fish, and the recipe varies from cook to cook. The following recipe is from Casinto De Gregorio, a Guipúzcoan who established a cozy little restaurant in St.-Jean-de-Luz in the 1920s. The restaurant, Chez Maya, is still in the family, and the cook, his grandson, Freddy, still uses his ttoro recipe.
TTORO
(for six)
6 hake steaks 2 large onions
6 very small monkfish 2 leeks
3 rascasse (a local redfish 1 3/4 pound tomatoes
in the same family as ocean 4 garlic cloves
perch, which is not a 1 pint white wine
substitute) 1 bouquet garni
2 large red gurnard (thyme, bay leaf
(a bony European fish) and parsley)
1 1/3 pound mussels pepper
6 nice-sized langoustines
Clean the fish. Cut the gurnard in slices. Filet the rascasse. Keep the bones.
Sauté the chopped onions, minced leek, and chopped garlic in olive oil for 15 minutes; add the heads and bones of the fish and cook slowly. Add the tomatoes, crushed, the wine, a quart of water, the bouquet garni, and pepper. Cook 90 minutes.
Clean and open the mussels, adding the juice to the pot.
Strain the liquid.
Flour the fish and sauté for 1 minute in olive oil.
Combine everything and cook slowly for 10 minutes.
Serve in soup bowls with garlic croutons.
Despite their inventive cooks, the Basques did not stay in their little sea, content with its little creatures. What first drove them out farther than the known world was the pursuit of a deadly but profitable giant: the Basque whale.
PLINY, THE FIRST-CENTURY Roman naturalist, described whales as creatures that lived off the north coast of Iberia. Until the Basques overhunted them, giant whales, along with porpoises and dolphins, made the Bay of Biscay their winter home.
Several varieties of whale, including the huge sperm whale, could be seen off the rocky coastline. The most valued one has the scientific name Eubalaena glacialis, referring to the fact that it spent its summers amid the icebergs, cruising past pale blue glacier faces off Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador. When these waters began to freeze for the winter, it would come down to the Bay of Biscay. Some scientists had proposed the Latin name Balaena euskariensis after its popular name, the Euskera or Basque whale.
An important feature of the Basque whale was that, like the sperm whale, but unlike many whale species, it floated when dead. The whale’s back shone obsidian black in the water, though the belly was a brilliant white. Averaging about fifty to sixty feet in length, a quarter of which was the huge head, a single animal could weigh more than sixty tons. Such a whale would yield thirty tons of blubber, which could be cooked down to an oil valued for centuries as fuel. Most coastal Basque communities established facilities along their beaches for cooking down whale blubber. As with most things Basque, it is not certain when this oil trade began, but in 670, at the end of the age