In addition to my fondness for offal and meat with a “gamey” quality (not just duck and lamb but elk, deer, pheasant, and grouse…that sort of thing), my culinary proclivities include the little fishies: anchovies and sardines. In fact, two of my most favored dishes, puttanesca pasta and Caesar salad, feature anchovies prominently in their preparation. Neither dish would be what it is without them.
So I was properly alarmed (upon returning to these States from a trip to the Adriatic) to learn of a recent mass die-off of a large school of anchovies in the Santa Cruz Harbor. According to news reports, they fished some 11,500 POUNDS of dead anchovies out of the drink at the marina. That is nearly SIX TONS of anchovies. And that is just what they were able to net. Because anchovies decompose so quickly, some multiple of pounds beyond the 11,500 were irretrievable; they just fell apart, and there was nothing to do but watch them sink and wait for the waves and tides to wash them out to sea. While I missed the event by just a few days, I can nevertheless imagine the smell of several TONS of anchovies rotting in the water. Even in my olfactory imagination, the odor coats the back of my palate. Ish.
This was not the first time anchovies have died en masse in the harbor at Santa Cruz. Similar sudden deaths, while not common, have occurred often enough that measures to prevent them have been implemented. The last die-off happened 10 years ago, in September of 2014, and that event made this one look puny in comparison. In 2014, they trucked some 120 TONS of dead anchovies to the dump. Yikes. That could have kept Paul Newman in the Caesar salad dressing business for decades.
Thank heavens, the administrators down at the Harbor are now prepared for what appears to be a decennial event; they no longer truck the fetid fish to the county landfill but instead ship them to local farms, where the anchovy corpses are put to good use as fertilizer. A reasonable solution has been found to what would otherwise qualify as an unmitigated disaster. Still, I would not like to be stuck in traffic behind a dump truck loaded with a couple tons of them.
If you are like me, you are now wondering how this happens and why. As with much of life, there are no good answers to these questions. Well, technically we do know the how: every so often a large (very large, as it happens) school of anchovies gathers at the mouth of the harbor and somehow communally decides that it would be a good thing to enter a narrow channel that has been dredged to dock a few dozen boats. The marina in Santa Cruz harbors vessels that range from mom-and-pop commercial fishing boats that seek Monterey Bay salmon, crab, and rockfish to sailboats and a few personal run-abouts. It’s a quaint, cozy cul-de-sac of a waterway, barely as wide as an LA freeway. The why is a little less clear. Whether it’s that they are chased into the marina by predators (apparently I’m not the only stalker that feeds on them) or it’s a case of bad advice from a Fearless Leader, the fish suddenly engulf the marina. Before they can realize that a terrible mistake has been made – a decidedly lethal mistake – they are dying. Turns out that hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of little fish use up an alarming amount of dissolved oxygen when they are schooled gill-to-gill. The open Pacific Ocean is a large place that easily accommodates the O2 needs of an anchovy school, but it seems that a small-town marina is not. Before they even know there is a problem, the oxygen plummets to a level that does not sustain life, and scores of fish expire within moments.
Having seen this event repeat itself with some degree of regularity, the harbormasters have acted by installing an oxygenation system, which they fire up when a school of panicked (or perhaps misinformed) anchovies enters the waters. This device has managed to prevent smaller-scale piscatorial suicide missions over the years, but a million or two little fishies can and do overwhelm the system. It’s a shame, no doubt, but I don’t think much more can be done about it, short of filling in the marina. Life is like that; sometimes there is no reasonable recourse but to live with the occasional tragedy.
While there is not much more that can be done to prevent future ancho-pocalypses, perhaps there is something to be learned. My mind immediately endeavors to translate an event such as this into an instructional metaphor that might help avoid a similar result, or at least provide a glimmer of understanding. I’m not exactly sure what that metaphor might look like for you, but I’m sure there are several ways of interpreting events like these. Let’s face it: on matters of life and death on a macro-scale, I am an unreliable narrator – better you should petition Dostoevsky, Faulkner, or the late, great Jim Harrison. So feel free to take with ample grains of salt my perspective, which is that breathlessly following the crowd can lead to physical, if not spiritual, suffocation. Now, I’m not arguing against socialization here. Like anchovies, humans clearly benefit from communal living. Still, any community can and does make decisions that are Horribly Wrong, which our recent election has abundantly illustrated. Another take is that, despite our many machinations to counter it, the Grim Reaper will catch up to us all – some day, some how. Either you get eaten in the open ocean by a hungry pelican diving on you from the inscrutable heavens above, or you suffocate while taking refuge in an over-crowded waterway meant only to float a few boats and not to sustain your life. Either way leaves you just as dead.
In the end, it all ends. Meanwhile though, we can and should eat, with mucho gusto if possible. To counter-balance the decidedly downbeat nature of this missive, I am rewarding my gentle readers with not just one but TWO anchovy-based recipes, both of which have been time-tested and tweaked over the decades. Eat Well.
Caesar Salad Dressing
Is there a better salad than the venerable Caesar? While the Wedge, Chop, or a bowl of just-plucked spring greens drizzled with a perfectly balanced vinaigrette have their place, the Caesar would be right up there if I had to choose just one. The complementary flavors, combined with a pleasurable crunch, are both satisfying and inspiring. Over the years, various chefs have morphed the Caesar into something that can, at times, barely resemble the original, which was invented by the Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini in Tijuana, Mexico. Mine sticks close to Cardini’s recipe and goes something like this:
½ cup grated parmesan cheese (go Parmigiano Reggiano)
3 large cloves peeled garlic
2 tsp Dijon mustard
3 anchovy fillets (this is a starting point; you can do more or less, and I recommend more)
2 egg yolks
Juice of 1 lemon
3 dashes hot sauce of choice (my house pour is the Cholula brand)
2 dashes Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup good EVOO
Put the first nine ingredients in a food processor and pulse repeatedly until the solids are well chopped and the egg yolks are creamy. With the motor running, add the cup of EVOO very slowly, barely a drop at a time at first, then in an ever-so-thin stream. The goal is a thick-ish emulsification rather than a runny dressing, which is what you would get if you just whirred it all together in the processor. Learning how to make an emulsification is part of the joy of the kitchen and should be part of every home cook’s repertoire. You can emulsify a sauce by whisking it by hand, but this can require wrist strength of professional proportions. I do whisk my hollandaise by hand, but there the heat assists the process. For a cold dressing like a Caesar, the food-processor cheat is fine in my book.
Once you have the dressing made (and it will hold in the fridge for a couple weeks at least), you can go lots of directions. I often split a smallish head of romaine lengthwise and char it briefly on a hot gas or charcoal grill, just long enough to make marks. For the croutons, I like to get mine well-toasted in a 350-degree oven and then smash them into crunchy crumbs. For years I made the typical bite-sized square cubes, but the crumbled treatment they give them at Ethan Stowell’s How To Cook A Wolf restaurant in Madison Park, Seattle has persuaded me that this is the way I like them best. Just put some good cubed bread in the oven, roast until DGB (delicious golden brown), and break them into a crumble with a rolling pin. Now you will have delicious crunchiness in every bite of your salad. Drizzle the dressing over the grilled romaine halves, top with crouton crumbs, add more grated Parmigiano Reggiano and dig in.
Pasta Puttanesca
If it weren’t for the anchovies, this dish would be vegan, but I’m afraid you can’t omit them and still call it puttanesca. “Puttanesca” refers to the dish’s association with Italian brothels, specifically those in Naples. The exact origin is debated, but it clearly has some connection with prostitution – which is fine by me, no judgement. Some say the smell of the cooking sauce wafting through open doors and windows was an enticement for paying customers to enter. Others say that the “quick and spicy” nature of the sauce was akin to the experience one might expect in such an establishment.
My own experience with sex workers (Italian or otherwise) is decidedly lacking, but if this dish was included in the transaction…well, you never know. Here’s my take:
3-4 (or more) cloves of good garlic
3 (or more) anchovy fillets, canned in olive oil
2 tsp crushed red peppers
1/2 cup chopped kalamata olives
2 Tbsp capers (chopped or whole)
Large can whole tomatoes (preferably real Italian ones from San Marzano), crushed by hand
Parsley, oregano, and basil, fresh if you have it
Chop the garlic and set aside. Roughly chop the anchovies, mashing them with the blade of a chef’s knife until you have a paste. Combine this with the garlic and chop some more to mix them well. Add oil to a pan set on medium heat and add the garlic/anchovy mixture. Add the crushed red peppers and sauté a few seconds. Add the crushed tomatoes, kalamata olives, and capers. Bring to a simmer and turn down to low. Add the herbs. You don’t need to cook this all afternoon; just a few minutes does the trick. While you are assembling the sauce ingredients, you can cook your pasta, which can be spaghetti, linguine, penne, rigatoni, or whatever you want. Add a little of the pasta water to the sauce, stir well, and then add the al dente pasta to finish cooking. If you need a protein with this, you could add a tin of excellent tuna or some sliced, cooked sausages. Puttanesca is a dish that really only takes the amount of time necessary to cook the pasta, assuming you have your mise en place together.
Enjoy!
I could not think of a good music video to pair with anchovies, but watching the recent SNL 50th anniversary special brought this bit to mind. I laughed my 16 year old head off when I saw it originally, and it is still funny, at least it is to my decidedly warped sense of humor.
meezenplace 