Anchovies By Nick Fisher

Anchovies

By Nick Fisher

In Russia they smoke them. In China they dry them to a crisp. In Italy they can them. And in Vietnam they pound them into a pungent fish sauce. In Corsica, they blend them with baby figs and sweet red peppers. For such a tiny inconsequential fish, the anchovy has a global fan base.

Most of us Brits only really ever experience anchovies as something super-salty stuck to the top of a pizza, or the inhabitants of the world’s smallest and flattest tin cans.

The anchovy is a member of the herring, or clupeidae family. It’s an incredibly bony, filter-feeding fish which strains plankton though its gills, and is only really comfortable travelling in massive shoals. These heavily-attended anchovy migrations around the Mediterranean and southern European coastlines, stretch up as far as southern Norway and even Devon and Cornwall during the winter months

Holland’s massive inland sea, the Zuider Zee, is a regular stopover for the anchovy caravan. The shoals enter the shallow warm sea in the early summer months, where the high water temperatures and low current movement are conducive to spawning. Like so many of God’s creatures, the anchovy regards Holland as its number one top sex venue.

Anyone who’s ever flirted with Nigella Lawson or got naked with Jamie Oliver, might consider themselves very modern and enlightened, for seeking out fresh anchovies for their culinary creations. But anchovies are in fact something the British have a long and salty history with.

The Romans first brought anchovies to Blighty, and in Elizabethan times a barrel of salted anchovies was de rigeur in the best larder. The anchovy really earned its place in our hearts in the 18th and 19th centuries when it became the essential ingredient of many of our favourite bottled sauces like Pontac Ketchup and Burgess’s Anchovy Essence (1760). It hit the big time in 1838 when it was used as the basis for Worcestershire Sauce.

When anchovies are caught, they have white flesh. They are beheaded and gutted then packed in layers of salt. In some delicatessens these simply cured white anchovies can be bought in round tubs, sometimes preserved in additional vegetable oil. These are the biggest, plumpest anchovies. The smaller ones are cured and pressed for longer. The better class fish are later removed, washed and canned, while the smallest ones are left in the cure until they soften and liquefy and then get shipped to Lea and Perrins to make the perfect addition to a first class Bloody Mary.

Although anchovies are all pretty small, size does matter. And any anchovy connoisseur will tell you that there are between 35 and 37 perfect anchovies per kilo. Not more. Not less. For the highest market price and most valuable culinary value this is the perfect size.

Humans aren’t the only anchovy enthusiasts. Flocks of sea birds and just about every fish-eating fish enjoys an anchovy appetizer. And researchers in California have discovered that ants are crazy to get in on the anchovy action.

Members of a research team were fascinated to observe millions of ants swarming over piles of sea bird poop. They concluded that the anchovy component in a seagull’s dump was what really got the ants’ tastebuds talking. And so, using anchovies mixed with salt, sugar and poison, they went on to produce one of the most effective ant pesticides. Even when it’s laced with toxin, the ants can’t resist the prospect of an anchovy snack.

The anchovy and the sardine have a strangely choreographed dance of life and death around each other. When the sardine populations are healthy, anchovies are in trouble, and vice versa. Biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium have been tracking the rise and fall of the opposing populations over the last century, and have discovered that the health and welfare of these shoaling fish relates also to massive shifts in the world’s climate patterns.

Explosions in sardine populations have meant wet spells in the south west of the USA. And a rise in anchovy population has coincided with long term drought. Since the 1990s we have been experiencing a decline in the sardine population, and we are now entering a new ‘Anchovy Regime’, which is matched by increasingly dry weather in New Mexico. The last time the anchovies thrived was between the 1940s and 1970s, during which time New Mexico suffered a twenty year drought.

Surface weather patterns affect the seas, and the recent shifts in water temperatures has caused increased upwelling currents in the Pacific which brings plankton to the surface for anchovies to feed on.

Global warming might cause earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis and flooding around the world, but at least the pizzas should be good.