A fishy tail…

CHRIS BENNETT was, like many, saddened by the departure of the sardine shoals.

A RATHER stormy week, what with the August winds and one thing and another.

A walk on the beach does certainly clear the mind, especially when the mind has been a bit preoccupied with a poorly friend.

We had been discussing the recent ‘season’, and what a bit of a flop it had been. The visitors seemed to be fewer and the sardines yet fewer. There was once small flurry of activity in the beach opposite my house.

It lasted most of the morning and we, my visitors and I, watched the diving birds, failing like Kamikaze squadrons, and the shimmering of the barely concealed little fishes just beneath the waves.

There seems to be some controversy around the story of these tiny creatures.

Firstly, though, it is useful to remember that they are called sardines and pilchards. Both names are in use on the labels of tins.

The preservation of sardines was long the domain of the Portuguese, and the theory has it that their’s were the best because of the salt used to keep them. The Portuguese were one of the early providers of bay salt (as opposed to sea-salt) to England, where the salt curing of fish, or smoke curing in the case of those delicious kippers (if ever you are in Scotland try Arbroath Smokeys), acquired great importance in the time before refrigeration.

Bay salt, of which Maldon in Essex produces surely the finest, is evaporated by the warmth of the sun in large pans on the shoreline. Sea salt is evaporated by artificial heat.

On my map of the England of 886, much of which would have been according to the Venerable Bede, our first historian, writer and cartographer, and the patron of all writers and historians, Maldon was on the map (literally) when the Danes arrived to knock a little sense into the heads of the locals. They, and maybe even the Romans, had used Maldon salt. You can get it at Pick ’n Pay.

Bede’s most important, and famous work, which this remarkable man finished in about 731, was “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People”, but I am sure you knew that.

Back to the sardines.

Although the Portuguese are the most closely associated with this delicious and healthy food, it does seem that the chaps on the Mediterranean Island of Sardinia may have a small stake in the claim for originality. And so do the French, of course. Well, they would, wouldn’t they now?

The French insist that the delicacy of their sardines comes from the exceptional beauty and fineness of the olive oil used in the cannin process. Before canning was invented the Atlantic Port of nantes became quite famous for its jars of preserved sardines.

My vote goes to the Sardinians because on their products, pressed and salted mullet roe, was at the feast celebrating the crowing of King James II. That was in 1685.

So, let’s hope that next years June yields a bit more than gannets for our entertainment.

Now I must go and feed the birds.