There are numerous variations on the classic shellfish sauce recipe - Lobster Thermidor being the most well known, crab makes a cracking substitute and is preferred by many.....
Monday 30 July 2012
Cracking crab thermidor courtesy of Kevin
Monday's fresh fish course
We’re all crazy for Cornish sardines!
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| Freshly landed Cornish sardines are held in iced water |
Here's an article that appeared in the Telegraph today: We are staring through the gloaming into a cold sea. “Look, there, can you see it?” says Stefan Glinski. His oilskins gleam yellow under the bright sodium lights that make the fishing boat look like a night-time film set. He points to a flash of silver in the water. “In a minute we’ll be able to see what we’ve got.” What we’ve got turns out, as the circular net pulls tighter and the splashy flick-flack of their tails grows louder, to be herring. About five tonnes of them. Dash. We were really after sardines.
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| Make sure the charcoal bed is really hot and the flames have gone before cooking your sardines |
Sales of fresh sardines at Tesco have rocketed by180 per cent in the past year. “We think they’ve become more popular because people go on holiday to the Mediterranean, eat them there in the sun, then have them at home too,” says Tesco’s Mike Baess. It’s probably also because they are relatively cheap, a good source of omega-3 and can be sustainably fished (a rather hotter topic than I imagined, and one I’ll come back to in a minute). But in particular, despite the Mediterranean influence, we are eating even more Cornish sardines. In 2010, 1,080 tonnes of this ocean fish were landed in Cornwall and sales last year rose by 51 per cent — quite an achievement considering that as the 20th century drew to a close sardine fishing in Cornwall had almost died out.Even 54-year-old Glinski has been catching them for only nine years, and he is a stalwart of the local waters who has been fishing since he was 16.
Sardines, or pilchards, as they used to be known — the Latin name is sardina pilchardus — have an important place in Cornish history. Salted, pressed and packed into wooden barrels and boxes, for centuries they were a delicacy that was was shipped all over Europe. Then the fish slowly fell out of fashion as domestic refrigeration caught on. “In 1995 only seven tonnes of sardines were caught off the Cornish coast,” says Nick Howell of The Pilchard Works fish suppliers in Newlyn. “The market was dying fast as the little shops that sold them closed down. I realised I needed to do something about it.”
He had the clever idea of changing the name from pilchards, with its overtones of ration food, to Cornish sardines. He also persuaded a supermarket buyer who called to ask if he could get hold of some French sardines that what the store actually wanted was pilchards from Cornwall — and, later, along with others, lobbied for Cornish sardines to be given their own PDO (Protected Designation of Origin), an EU status that they successfully obtained a couple of years ago. There was just one problem: back in the Nineties hardly anyone was actually catching sardines.
“We were buying from the Scottish boats coming in to do the mackerel in the winter,” says Howell. “It was a by-catch for them. Then I was chatting to Nutty Noah about it one day…” Nutty who? “Nutty Noah. We all call him that. He’s about 6ft 4in and has a big beard under his chin like an Amish. His real name’s Martin Ellis. Anyway, he bought an old ring net from a chap in Mousehole and started fiddling about with it, catching sardines. He tends to have these wild ideas. “We’re a small community down here and he’s from across the bay, a Cadgwith man, so for a year and a half they all just watched him and didn’t want to copy him. He actually sank the bloody boat in the end, had to have the helicopter out. Anyway, that’s when Stefan started. And others soon followed him.”
Glinski also fishes with a ring net. He shows me how it works as we sit in the fishy-smelling cabin of his boat, White Heather, while the three members of his crew work outside. “We can shoot the net at any moment, as long as we’re not near rocks that might tear it. These things cost £25,000.” He uses sonar to spot shoals of fish beneath the surface, then wheels the boat in a circle, dropping the net — 250m long and 60m deep — around them. Then the purse rope, which pulls the net closed at the bottom, can be tightened and the catch drawn in. The reason we are out at night is simple: if it’s light and the fish can see the net, they are more likely to swim off, sharpish, before it closes. “The fish are here almost all year round,” says Glinski. “There’s just a short gap of a couple of months in the spring when we don’t have them. The highest fat content is in July, August, September and that’s when they taste the best. Then it starts to drop off in December so by March they’re skinnier and a bit out of condition and don’t taste as good.” There are also lots of them — hundreds of thousands of tonnes.
This is good news for those concerned about sustainable fishing, bad news for anyone unfortunate enough to get Glinski started on the subject of certification. “Yes, we are certified,” he says with a baleful look at the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) representative standing in the corner of what suddenly feels like a very small and slightly precarious cabin. “There are four boats and two processors in our fishery and we’re certified by the MSC but we’re thinking of pulling out. When we signed up they said it would cost £1,000 a year and £3,000 for a re-audit. Costs now are actually running at £5,500 a year and they’re now quoting £18,000 for re-certification in three years’ time. And we don’t see any benefit to it. I don’t think customers even know what the MSC sticker means. And half the time the supermarkets don’t put it on anyway.”
Happily for the nervous-looking MSC man, Glinski is distracted at this point by some noisy seagulls which suggest that there may be fish near by. A few minutes later he is giving the order to shoot the net. And shortly after that we are all distracted by the mesmerisingly beautiful sight of several tonnes of fish thrashing and flashing, the light catching their silver scales as they pour in a glorious stream from the net into the boat. Good enough to eat? More and more of us certainly think so.
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| The Cornish sardine boats often work within sight of their home port of Newlyn in Mount's Bay |
Article courtesy of Daily Telegraph Food and Drink.
And from another article in the same paper, here's a good reason to be a fisherman:
Farmers, forestry workers and fishermen happier than the rest of us, ONS study to find
Saturday 28 July 2012
Bess't crab cocktail - Mexican style
Cornish crab, Nagra chilli, tequila and more, all go to make a superbly spicy BBQ starter - nice one Kevin!
£1.6m fine for EU fish scam in flouting fishing quotas
Two Spanish fishing firms have been hit with the heftiest fine yet in an English court for flouting EU fishing quotas in a scam worth more than half a million pounds.
Yesterday at Truro Crown Court, Hijos De Vidal Bandin SA and its British-registered subsidiary, Sealskill Limited, were ordered to pay out a total of £1.62 million.
Fishing boats belonging to each company were involved in the £540,000 fiddle, which included lying in logbooks and landing declarations, and transferring catches between vessels. Prosecutors had argued the firms should pay £2.7 million, but Judge Graham Cottle said he did not want to drive them out of business. Between them they were ordered to pay a confiscation order of £925,000 and a £500,000 fine, while the £195,000 court costs were also ordered to be split.
The two skippers involved were each ordered to pay fines of £5,000. Judge Cottle described the operation as “a systematic, repeated and cynical” abuse of EU fishing quotas and labelled it “sophisticated”. He said: “This was a serious breach of EU fishing regulations. It involved the flagrant, repeated and long-term abuse of regulations carried out by the masters of both vessels with the full knowledge, complicity and direction of the Spanish-registered companies. It involved targeting hake – what was certainly at that time a seriously endangered species. “Substantial profit ensued. It was sophisticated in the particular sense that transshipping [shifting catches between vessels] was a feature.”
The firms, their owners and skippers found themselves in front of the courts after their criminal activities came to light in July 2010 after plundering stocks in Scottish and Irish waters before landing hauls in Spain and the UK. HMS Tyne was patrolling off the coast of the Isles of Scilly when officers made a routine check of the Coyo Tercero owned by Hijos De Vidal Bandin SA. They discovered a concealed stash of salted ling weighing 574kg which had not been entered into the logbook. It sparked an investigation by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO), which found that skipper Jose Antonio Perez Garcia, 42, lied in logbooks. Entries in the document pointed to a second boat, the O’Genita owned by Sealskill Limited and skippered by Jose Manuel Martinez Sanchez, 40.
Using satellite technology, the MMO learned that catches of hake had passed from one vessel to the other, which is illegal, and no note had been made in logbooks. Manuel Vidal Suarez, 64, and Maria Dolores Vidal Marino, 40, were company directors of Hijos De Vidal Bandin SA and Sealskill Limited respectively. At a previous hearing, the four entered pleas to nine counts from between August 2008 and August 2010. Suarez and Marino entered pleas on behalf of their firms and for themselves. Both skippers and companies pleaded guilty to all of the charges relating to falsifying logbooks and shifting fish between boats.
The owners and skippers entered not guilty pleas to a string of fraud and theft charges. Suarez and Marino denied the offences. Their pleas were accepted by the Crown. Brian Lett, QC, defending all the defendants, said they were considering appealing. After the hearing, Danny Poulding, senior investigating officer for the MMO said it was the highest court order amount ever imposed in a fisheries case brought by them. He said: “This company systematically abused the quota system for significant and unfair financial gain, threatening the future sustainability of an already vulnerable fish stock and impacting on the businesses of legitimate fishermen by flooding the market with cheaper fish. “The majority of the fishing industry is compliant with the rules that govern its commercial activities, but we will ensure that those who aren’t do not enjoy unfair financial advantage from illegal sales.”
Paul Trebilcock, chief executive of the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation, said the fine sent a clear message to those bent on breaking the rules. “Here in the UK we have had a rigorously enforced fishing regime for years and years with satellite technology, electronic logbooks and other measures. All we want is a level playing field and consistency.” Jim Porteous, of the South West Fisheries Producers Organisation, said while foreign firms were allowed to operate under the British flag, flouting of rules would continue. He said: “Quota hopping has been going on since 1977 and will continue unless the rules change. The British Government tried to take Europe on over this but lost. It demonstrates we are subservient to European law. It’s sad we can’t properly protect our fish stocks.”
Courtesy of ThisisCornwall
Typical Spanish fishing vessel
Fishing boats belonging to each company were involved in the £540,000 fiddle, which included lying in logbooks and landing declarations, and transferring catches between vessels. Prosecutors had argued the firms should pay £2.7 million, but Judge Graham Cottle said he did not want to drive them out of business. Between them they were ordered to pay a confiscation order of £925,000 and a £500,000 fine, while the £195,000 court costs were also ordered to be split.
The two skippers involved were each ordered to pay fines of £5,000. Judge Cottle described the operation as “a systematic, repeated and cynical” abuse of EU fishing quotas and labelled it “sophisticated”. He said: “This was a serious breach of EU fishing regulations. It involved the flagrant, repeated and long-term abuse of regulations carried out by the masters of both vessels with the full knowledge, complicity and direction of the Spanish-registered companies. It involved targeting hake – what was certainly at that time a seriously endangered species. “Substantial profit ensued. It was sophisticated in the particular sense that transshipping [shifting catches between vessels] was a feature.”
The firms, their owners and skippers found themselves in front of the courts after their criminal activities came to light in July 2010 after plundering stocks in Scottish and Irish waters before landing hauls in Spain and the UK. HMS Tyne was patrolling off the coast of the Isles of Scilly when officers made a routine check of the Coyo Tercero owned by Hijos De Vidal Bandin SA. They discovered a concealed stash of salted ling weighing 574kg which had not been entered into the logbook. It sparked an investigation by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO), which found that skipper Jose Antonio Perez Garcia, 42, lied in logbooks. Entries in the document pointed to a second boat, the O’Genita owned by Sealskill Limited and skippered by Jose Manuel Martinez Sanchez, 40.
Using satellite technology, the MMO learned that catches of hake had passed from one vessel to the other, which is illegal, and no note had been made in logbooks. Manuel Vidal Suarez, 64, and Maria Dolores Vidal Marino, 40, were company directors of Hijos De Vidal Bandin SA and Sealskill Limited respectively. At a previous hearing, the four entered pleas to nine counts from between August 2008 and August 2010. Suarez and Marino entered pleas on behalf of their firms and for themselves. Both skippers and companies pleaded guilty to all of the charges relating to falsifying logbooks and shifting fish between boats.
The owners and skippers entered not guilty pleas to a string of fraud and theft charges. Suarez and Marino denied the offences. Their pleas were accepted by the Crown. Brian Lett, QC, defending all the defendants, said they were considering appealing. After the hearing, Danny Poulding, senior investigating officer for the MMO said it was the highest court order amount ever imposed in a fisheries case brought by them. He said: “This company systematically abused the quota system for significant and unfair financial gain, threatening the future sustainability of an already vulnerable fish stock and impacting on the businesses of legitimate fishermen by flooding the market with cheaper fish. “The majority of the fishing industry is compliant with the rules that govern its commercial activities, but we will ensure that those who aren’t do not enjoy unfair financial advantage from illegal sales.”
Paul Trebilcock, chief executive of the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation, said the fine sent a clear message to those bent on breaking the rules. “Here in the UK we have had a rigorously enforced fishing regime for years and years with satellite technology, electronic logbooks and other measures. All we want is a level playing field and consistency.” Jim Porteous, of the South West Fisheries Producers Organisation, said while foreign firms were allowed to operate under the British flag, flouting of rules would continue. He said: “Quota hopping has been going on since 1977 and will continue unless the rules change. The British Government tried to take Europe on over this but lost. It demonstrates we are subservient to European law. It’s sad we can’t properly protect our fish stocks.”
Courtesy of ThisisCornwall
Sustainable Cornish fish is the dish in the Olympic City
According to a report published today, on the eve of the London 2012 Games, London 2012’s sustainable fish policy has already inspired a fabulous fish legacy for years to come, as long-term sustainable fish policies have been adopted by caterers that together serve well over 100 million meals a year. Sustainable fish and chips will also be a top feature of the London 2012 Olympic menu, thanks to London 2012’s commitment to be “the greenest Games yet”
Let's hope that includes accredited Cornish fish from Newlyn like bass, mackerel, Cornish sardines and pollack!
Newlyn girl Helen Glover rowing for gold
That's heat one won and in Olympic record time - Well done Helen and Heather!
and if you get the chance when you are in Newlyn, grab one of her Dad's world famous (as endorsed by the BBC this morning) Jelberts ice creams!
Cornish Fish - Feeding the 2012 Olympics
Chances are plenty of Olympians will be eating plenty of Cornish fish during their time here.......
Friday 27 July 2012
Gap2 Project - How do scientists and fishermen work together?
How do scientists and fishermen work together?
Fisheries scientist Emma Pearson works with crab fishermen in Devon on a daily basis. Check out what a day onboard a crabbing vessel is like for those scientists collecting data and how the fishermen feel about having a scientist along for the ride. GAP2 is an EU wide project, bringing fishermen, scientists and policy makers together, to work towards sustainable fisheries for the benefit of society. We manage 13 projects spread across Europe, and one of them is in Devon, in the South West of England.
Would you want to go for a day's fishing with the Devon crabbers?
Fisheries scientist Emma Pearson works with crab fishermen in Devon on a daily basis. Check out what a day onboard a crabbing vessel is like for those scientists collecting data and how the fishermen feel about having a scientist along for the ride. GAP2 is an EU wide project, bringing fishermen, scientists and policy makers together, to work towards sustainable fisheries for the benefit of society. We manage 13 projects spread across Europe, and one of them is in Devon, in the South West of England.
Would you want to go for a day's fishing with the Devon crabbers?
Thursday 26 July 2012
Simply the best! - Mount's Bay mackerel on the BBQ
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