Fort on food: fish

There’s something hard to resist about a fresh sardine, with its bright, inquisitive eye, shimmering scales, silver on the sides, darkening to gunmetal blue on top, and its neat, trim, perfect portion control shape rich in all sorts of good oils. I think we think of the sardine as the archetypal Mediterranean fish, grilled in the Portuguese fashion; fried in olive oil in the manner of Spanish; broken in bits and lined up with raisins, wild fennel and pine nuts to make a sauce for bucatini in the baroque style of Sicilians, and if you saw ‘Grilled Pilchard’ on the menu, you’d probably pass on with a barely suppressed shudder. And yet, what is a sardine, but a pilchard that hasn’t grown up?

Cornwall used to lead the world in pilchard production, still does, in a manner of speaking, even if they aren’t there in the numbers of old, According the peerless Alan Davidson in his majestic ‘North Atlantic Seafood, which should be on the bookshelf of every self-respecting cook, quoting Frank Buckland’s The Natural History of British Fishes (1883) one boat took 80,000 pilchards in a single night. There’s still a decent pilchard fishery there, and although you don’t often see fresh pilchards, they turn up in tins.

That’s the thing with sardines. They spread from Portugal, France and Spain, to Britain. They’re plentiful, so you can eat them with a clear conscience. And they’re versatile. The Italians eat them in their larval, known as neonati or gianchetti. And I’m very partial to a tinned sardine, kept in olive oil or spicy tomato sauce. Loaded onto toast with a slice or two of cucumber, they make a very decent light lunch. Still, fresh is best.

There was a time, a few years ago, admittedly, when fishmongers couldn’t give away sea bass. They were considered a very lower order fish. Then chefs discovered them, and found that a) they were cheap (back then); b) they cut up into nice portions; c) when scaled, their skins remained bright silver when cooked, and so looked very pretty on the plate; and their fate was sealed. They became the smart fish of choice, so much so that it became necessary to farm them to keep up with demand.

Of course, there’s a world of difference between a farmed sea bass and the wild variety. For a start there’s size. Wild sea bass can grow to double pound figures (although I’ve never caught one), while farmed sea bass tend to go to the 500g – 1kg size. And if you see a shoal of same sized sea bass on the fishmongers slab, you can bet that they were raised in cages off the coast of Greece of Tunisia or somewhere like that, and their flesh will not have the muscular tautness or the sweet flavour of the wild one.

They seem to be accepted as sustainable by most authorities, but, as with hand-picked scallops, go for the line caught fish. They’re what you might call a versatile fish and take to frying, steaming or being cooked en papillote equally well.