One of those days

It's not often a day comes along when, after a good, early breakfast, there is nothing left to do but ponder on what to have for lunch. Given a large supply of unusual fish my thoughts turn to methods of preparation. There's a colourful 'tord roquer' in the freezer, a corkwing wrasse, symphodus melops and it begs to be cooked 'a la sal'--baked in salt. There's not enough coarse salt in the cupboard however, and a trip in the car to the shops is anathema to the pleasant, languid mood of the morning.

It doesn't take much thought to arrive at the perfect conclusion: sail down the coast to next town where there's a supermarket near the beach. Strange as it seems to go to sea to buy salt I quickly prepare OB and launch into a flat sea and offshore breeze. I sail large parallel to the beach and lie back with my weight to windward as the inevitable gust powers OB to top speed. The town turns up way too early and I sail out to sea for a few turns on the stiffer wind. The Mestral when blowing moderately and early in the day usually foretells a noon calm and subsequent wind shift to the south west. So as the wind dies I stow the sails and row to the beach, rolling OB up the sand on a fender.

I dig out some flip flops and coins and cross the beach and the busy promenade, through an alley, across a square to the small supermarket where I buy salt, wine, bread and potatoes. I've earned a beer and so I sit down at an aluminium table on the terrace of a near-by bar. I'm half way though the beer when a familiar figure comes down the street. It's skipper MacGyver out to buy a roast chicken for Sunday lunch. He sits down and we order more beer. He's seen the boat on the beach and is tickled when I tell him I've come shopping. Another fisherman turns up, the shopping story is retold and more beers are ordered.

We could sit here all day but people have wives to get home to and MacGyver still hasn't bought his chicken. The wind has kicked in again, now from the southwest. MacGyver walks a way with me, confessing that although he's spent all his life on the sea, he's never been sailing. He refuses to tread on the sand and watches me prepare the boat from the promenade.

I launch OB, row out a short way, quickly lower the rudder and daggerboard before hoisting the sails. I back the main to turn the boat, the wind catches and we fly large, winging homeward. OB covers the two and half miles in half an hour and soon I'm in the kitchen burying the wrasse in coarse salt, I dig through the snowy layer until I uncover the eye, left bear this glassy orb will turn opaque when the fish is cooked through.

I parboil some potatoes then saute them in olive oil. But I'm having trouble judging if that eye has turned sufficiently pale and eventually err far on the side of caution. By the time I chip the fish out of it's salt crust it is overcooked and drier than I'd like. However, the spirit of the morning pervades and the inexpensive wine I've bought is surprisingly good. And as so often happens with food the enjoyment comes from the situation and the story that accompanies it. Overcooked, over-salty, bony corkwing wrasse never tasted so good.

Catalan Castaway

The book based on this blog is now available from Richard Wynne of Lodestar Books. Under the title Catalan Castaway, the selected writings focus on the seaborne adventures of Onawind Blue rather than her construction and include material that hasn't appeared here at the Invisible Workshop. The trip to Ibiza and OB's close shave with a fishing boat appear in full, illustrated with hand-drawn maps. Gavin Atkin has kindly written a glowing forward and supplied the plans for his design which are included as an appendix.

Richard Wynne has given the book a semi-coffee table format with an A5 layout and he has selected photos of OB and the sea to accompany the text. The book has been printed on A4 paper thus necessitating getting the whole lot chopped in half. When I last spoke to Dick he was just off to find a boatbuilder with a bandsaw to do the job. A more fitting way of finishing a book about a small homemade boat I can't imagine.

Not only have I had a lot of fun building and sailing OB but also writing about her. And to some extent when I became ill with cancer my solo experiences on the water helped me through. At least my memories of sparkling Mediterranean waters and a lively little hull were a place I could escape to during the gruelling days in hospital. I'm proud and pleased that my writing has been considered printable, and to see this part of my life neatly bound in book form gives me a good solid point to move on from.  

Another treat

The fishermen I know are generally traditional in their tastes. And why not, when you have plentiful fresh fish and fantastic raw ingredients like olive oil, tomatoes, peppers, garlic and almonds as well as simple, timeworn recipes. I can well imagine someone having tried any species of fish 'al romescu' being reluctant to try another style of preparation. Why bother when something is already sublime. The thing is that there are many sublime ways that really fresh fish can be prepared (although there are none that can redeem long-dead ones). Olive oil is fitting in that it smacks of vibrancy and light compared with the clogging heaviness of other fats but there are times when nothing can better butter.

So when a damaged, unsaleable sole (solea solea) comes up in the net it's time to break out the butter and the flour for a classic sole meurnière. In her book French Provincial Cooking Elizabeth David praises la Mère Brazier's fine Lyonais bistro for providing what 'I do truly believe to be the most delicious and deliciously cooked sole meurnière I have ever eaten.' and goes on to question what passes for the dish in London restaurants. So despite this being generally considered a simple dish there is some historic pressure to get it right. David also astutely lists the problems of preparing sole meurnière for a dinner party in the domestic kitchen highlighting the size of the fish as one of the drawbacks. Unfortunately this is no longer quite so applicable and most soles these days (at least in the Mediterranean) will fit comfortably into a large frying pan. However, her point about using clarified butter remains valid.

Clarified butter can withstand higher cooking temperatures without burning and is easy to make in small or large quantities. Having prepared the butter the next factor that needs to be exactly right is the quantity of flour. Meurnière means miller's wife, and I find that the image of a county maiden in clogs, beating flour from her apron helps avoid coating the fish too thickly. Season the flour before lightly dusting the sole.

Heat the clarified butter in a frying pan, add the sole and cook on both sides until golden. While the fish is frying make some noisette butter. Take some normal, unsalted butter and melt it in a small pan until light brown and nutty-smelling, remove the pan from the heat and place in cold water to arrest further cooking. Transfer the golden sole from the frying pan to a warm plate, immediately squeezing lemon juice over it. Season again then pour over the noisette butter.  

The beauties of bycatch

 Bycatch is one of the dirty words of sustainable fisheries. I'm fortunate not to have to witness much wastage in my small experience of commercial fishing. The fifteen souls and six boats that work from the nearby port bring in small catches and the unsaleable fish are taken by the fishermen, given to friends or sold. I earn a bag of fish big enough to last me a week for as much work as I feel like doing on Monday mornings. Being fascinated by fish in the sea and on the table as well as the world of fishermen, added to fact that I'll always drop everything to go on a boat of any sort, makes Monday mornings a holiday for me.

 The common torpedo (torpedo torpedo) is not a commercial species. It lives in shallow coastal waters over soft substrates and preys by night on small bony fish and crustaceans. It's downfall in terms of it becoming part of bycatch is its method of attack and defence.

The torpedo can deliver hefty electric shocks, up to 200 volts according to fishbase.org and the wikipedia. The shocks diminish in intensity as the animal dies and cease as it does. It is not practical to attempt to extract the torpedo from the net while it is evidently alive, and even when it appears dead it can often spark up again. And so it can never be returned to the water alive, unless it drops from the net as it comes over the roller and can be teased out through a scupper with the toe of a welly, or grabbed by the tail and flung. It appears to be the torpedo's back that shocks or the distinctive blue spots themselves, I've never touched one in such a way as to be shocked intentionally. Please excuse this lack of scientific fibre, I'm no Stephen Maturin.

Though they are widely thought to be uneatable, fishermen have always cooked them and I've found they make fine food. The difficulty, if there is one, is in preparing them for the pan as you have to peel off the tough skin—a task best performed on the dock, or outside at least. Many fishy jobs can cause havoc in the kitchen. 

Torpedo 'wings' with torpedo livers and sea snails.

All for a bag-full of bycatch

In the chill dark, an hour before dawn on Monday morning, I creep out of the house and go fishing.

I meet the fishermen on the dock and, with sleepy greetings, we step down onto the damp deck. Skipper MacGyver and David pull their ragged yellow oilskins from the tiny wheelhouse. I've come dressed in the same blue yachty wear that I use on OB, only that now, after a winter of fishing, the clothes are black-stained with cuttlefish ink, ringed with complex tide lines of salt and fish slime. They also harbour a permanent damp and stink. What were once reasonable quality foul weather clothes are now simply foul clothes.

The boat grumbles to life, shivering under foot, Flash fm blares a loud techno beat, MacGyver and David light up. We push off from the dock and chug out of the small port to meet the sea and the dawn with a pleasurable sense of expectation—maybe today the net will have some prime fish and no tiresome weed.

'Garbi o llevant?' MacGyver asks me. He wants me to take a shot at divining the direction of the current, garbi-west, llevant-east. After strong westerly winds on Sunday and a swell from the southwest today I say 'garbi' with confidence. MacGyver grunts and says 'llevant', David declares himself neutral. A deep red ellipse of sun appears briefly between the horizon and a thick bank of cloud. In the dull light we slow as we pass close to a fishing buoy all three peering into the depths to see how it lies. 'Llevant!' exclaims David, 'That's why MacGyver's the skipper.' I say, 'And I'm just the crazy volunteer deckhand.'

The net is set parallel to the coast which runs east west, and so we rumble on to our first buoy to haul the net in the same direction as the current. David grabs the buoy and hoicks it over the bulwark before passing the line round the roller drums on the bow. I pull the lever that sets the hydraulic machinery in motion and David and I look down at the buoy's anchor twirling up from below. We stop the rollers, tidy the line and secure the anchor then, rollers on, we wait for a first sight of the net. Being loaded with weed it brings a torrent of swearing from MacGyver and David. The quantity of brown twiggy clumps that come aboard with the first twenty metres portend a vast amount of work back at the dock untangling the weed from the mesh.

We are hoping for sole and cuttlefish—top sellers at the moment, though you don't want too much or the price falls. David goes back to the wheelhouse and holds the boat bow to the net while MacGyver hauls from amidships and I stand near the bow taking the swell with flexing knees, pulling trailing weed from the net and shouting back the names of fish as they come over the roller, only to be corrected by MacGyver. There aren't many of them, the weed in the net alerts the fish to its presence and they swim over it. Grey mullet, pandora, steenbras, bream, an octopus eating a grey mullet, a cuttlefish spurting a jet of ink in a wide arc as it comes over the roller and weed, tons of the stuff.

The net is long, too long to mention and though the fish are few and far between the eventual catch, though considered poor, is not entirely ruinous. As soon as the net is aboard MacGyver turns the boat for home and David and I set to the task of extracting fish, flinging them into buckets. With the swell hitting side on and the occasional whiff of exhaust, along with the pong of my clothes a slight dizziness comes. I lift my head and look forward, getting a light dousing of spray and thin rain. The tiredness behind my eyes mixed with the light headedness and the yawning hunger makes me feel like I'm returning from a party or maybe I'm just waking from a dream.

Place of Battle

In the days when the population around the Mediterranean was too small to make an impact and there was no rampant Japanese market the Mediterranean Sea had vigorously healthy tuna stocks. The fish would enter the Straits of Gibraltar in late spring and fill larders from Andalucia to Sicily and beyond. On the coast of Catalonia tuna fishing was an activity in which whole communities would participate. Villages were often built slightly inland on raised ground but when the tuna came the population would decamp to the beach and set up shop for the duration.

The method of fishing was called 'Almadrava'* and the technique was as follows. At a chosen beach a net would be set diagonally with respect to the land, with one end fixed to the sand and the other rowed out to sea and anchored. The fast swimming fish, entering the net, would find themselves forced ever nearer the beach until they reached the inevitable cul-de-sac. Here the villagers would wade in with harpoons while others in boats would attack the fish from behind. The word 'Almadrava' comes from Arabic and means 'place of battle'. Almadrava fishing was nothing short of a massacre. The moment of thrashing silver fish, wild water, sunlight, bronzed limbs and gushing blood is vividly depicted in Salvador Dalí's 'la pesca del atún' (Tuna fishing) painted on the Costa Brava over the summers of 1966 and '67 and capturing on canvas one of the last seasons of almadrava fishing.

Almost all of this abundant harvest of tuna would be conserved in olive oil. Originally in glass jars and later in tins. The fish tripe, salted and dried, would sustain the population over the winter. Nowadays, while you can buy tuna flesh in tins very cheaply and indeed, it's not enormously expensive even fresh, the dried tripe, tasty though it is, commands a price far beyond its worth. But such is the madness of the world we have made for ourselves.

*In Southern Spain tuna is still fished with a method called 'almadraba' (note the b rather than v that distinguishes the Catalan). The Andulucian almadraba is set at sea, as opposed to from the beach, the nets forming a maze that leads the fish to a central area. Boats converge and a net floor is raised bringing the tuna to the surface where they are killed and hauled aboard. Again it is a place of battle.  

A load of bull

 Local Catalan fisherman's food at its most traditional is tuna tripe. Salted and sun-dried in the style of salt cod it can been seen swinging in the breeze outside restaurants, as much to continue the drying as to advertise that fish tripe is on the menu. Like other foodstuffs once eaten only by fishermen tuna tripe, known as 'bull' in Catalan has become fashionable—at least in Catalonia—and now costs around 60 euros per kilo, if you can find it at the market.

The town of Torrdembarra considers itself the capital of 'bull' cusine and once a year holds a tasting day in which a pair of chefs cook various tapas which, for three euros per tapa (wine included), can be tried by the hungry public. For quite a few years I've queued up for my yearly dose of 'bull'.  

 This year the cooks involved were Oriol Castro of the Bulli foundation, Alex Segù from nearby restaurant Mulsum and, star of the show Iris Figuerola, fisherman's wife and renowned expert on all things 'bull' who demonstrated her 'bull al romesco', a stew made on a thick paste of almonds, dried peppers, garlic and fried bread, stock, tripe and potatoes.

 In go the spuds

Stomach or offal of any sort and of any animal tends to be an aquired taste and hard to err, stomach by the unconverted and 'bull' is no different. One woman I spoke to, who hasn't eaten it since she first tried it many years ago, said it tasted of urine. My opinion is a bit more generous. 'Bull' tastes vaguely of tuna with a more general and pervading fishy flavour underneath. What makes it more unusual, apart from its provenance, is its pleasantly spongy texture. But for me what heightens the pleasure of eating this offbeat foodstuff is its history. Knowing that this was the hard tack that sustained men on the sea makes all the difference. 

A foodstuff that hasn't yet become fashionable and which is usually discarded or kept back for personal consumption by the fishmonger is monkfish liver. As there is no demand for monkfish liver I can pick up this tasty and nourishing food for free, which means I can afford a few 'gambas' to go with it.

1. Monkfish liver, prawns, fried garlic and Malden salt.