FISH ON THE MENU:For an island people, we have never been too fond of seafood, but every morning a small army of fishermen take off in their boats to net fresh catch. DOMINI KEMPovercomes her fear of crabs to spend a day at the helm.
ART OF ME felt like a Russian spy in a James Bond film, getting ready to embark on a dangerous mission at sea at 0500 hours. The other part of me wanted to hit the snooze button. Who on Earth wants to get up at this ungodly hour of the morning to go fishing?
But I persevere and duly arrive at the port in Howth at 6.30am and wait for Alan Betson, Irish Timesphotographer and my companion for the day. It's already busy out here, with forklifts going up and down the docks, and men in wellies stacking crates and loading vans. They're all working too hard to notice how picture-perfect their work place is.
I meet Martin McLoughlin of Nicky’s Plaice, the wholesaler and retailer of all types of fish, and I’m welcomed into the shop and offered a coffee, which seems to be complimentary for everyone who comes here to shop for fish. But I’m warned not to drink too much before heading out to sea – the implication being that there won’t be a ladies’ loo on board our vessel.
The shop is busy, getting stocked with fresh fish. Empty display fridges are soon filled with mountains of crushed ice, which is the easiest and most effective way of achieving low temperatures without actually freezing the fish. I’ve often thought that melting or thawing ice wouldn’t be sufficient to keep the fish at the right temperature, but the opposite is true. The melted water shows that the ice is doing its job: reducing the temperature of the fish, keeping eyes bright, skin moist and flesh firm.
To say McLoughlin is passionate about fish would be an understatement. “It’s vital that we eat more fish,” he says. “We export most of our fish. We need more fish shops and we need to get people eating fish a few times a week. It can add up to eight years to your life.”
So why are we still more reluctant to eat fish than our European counterparts? Some would argue that it’s the influence of the Catholic Church and the fact that fish was traditionally eaten only on one day a week, as a penance. Some would say that it’s the association with fish as being a “peasant” food, a hang-up left over from the Famine and the fact that the English looked down on our diets as “vulgar”. The irony is that countries that seem to have a more sophisticated food culture, namely France and Spain, are buying up the food that we as a nation reject.
The truth is that we export 68 per cent of our fish catch, but that needs to be put into context: a lot of what we export is mackerel and herring and, frankly, there isn’t enough demand for them at home. The reason we import fish is that our demand for cod and salmon, for example, is huge. So the amount we fish locally has to be augmented with imports, unless we can start looking at the 70 or so varieties of fish found in our coastal waters with more of an open mind. This is where people such as Martin Shanahan of the Fishy Fishy cafe in Kinsale have been so successful. He has won the trust of his customers so that when he put a lesser-known type of fish on the menu, they will order it knowing it will be good, even if they’re not familiar with it.
Back in Nicky’s Plaice, the team behind the fish counters are filleting mackerel. To watch them in action would shame most chefs who think they’re pretty handy with a blade. I’ve seen this type of blade action before, in abattoirs – knife skills so smooth and refined, they look like they’re slicing butter with a hot knife. I watch them in awe and think how I’d love to do a day’s free labour to improve my own pathetic knife skills. It would be amazing to learn from these guys, but I notice not too many of them are what you’d describe as “young fellas”.
I wonder if this is a job that doesn’t attract young people and is something that you’re born into. These lost and forgotten skills are so vital to so many precious industries that there must be a way to encourage young guns to look at food as a real career.
Fisherman number two arrives to take us out to sea, because fisherman number one had “car trouble”. I’m sure this was a legitimate excuse for a bloke who probably gets up at this hour every morning, but it made me smile as, in the world of kitchens and restaurants, “car trouble” is generally one of those euphemisms for going on the batter (excuse the pun) and then not remembering where you left your car.
So it looks like Fisherman Joe is to take charge of us. Alan and I head over to the boat. It looks sturdy and compact. Bijou, you could say. It is actually very snug. I double-check how long we’re going to be hanging out together in this small boat, soon to be full of crabs and whelks, and realise it’s going to be a four-hour trip.
On board, there are crates and crates of dead crabs that are going back to sea to be put in the cages for the whelks – a type of sea snail that we Irish won’t eat, but which the French and Spanish love.
Now, the crates of dead crabs are grand. It’s the fact that we’re going out to pick up a few crates of live ones that has my heart palpitating. I am absolutely freaked out by live crabs. I grew up on an island in the Bahamas that was overrun with land crabs that appeared everywhere, even climbing and falling into loos. It’s their beady eyes that get me and the fact that they can break your finger with a mechanical clutch at one of your digits. Rats, spiders, snakes . . . nothing like that bothers me. Yet when I see a live crab, I scream like a five-year-old girl and desperately want to run faster than Forrest Gump.
I mentally slap myself around the place, but honestly, they are everywhere and we’re heading out to catch more. The seagulls escort us as we head towards Howth Head, as does a seal that is so fat, he could pass for some sort of whale. The boat chugs along, and the sun comes out. It’s going to be a glorious day and suddenly the 5am start seems like a very distant complaint.
The boat works efficiently even if the system is a bit crude. The pulley drags the pots up that have been marked on the sat nav, which helps, as the buoys can sometimes be hard to find. We remain very close to the shore. This is because crabs prefer rocks to the open seas. The pots are inevitably made of plastic. Bait of leftover fish heads is put at the bottom of a net that falls into the plastic pot. The crabs walk in, but find that they can’t get out. It’s so simple, but it works well. I thought those pesky crabs would be a whole lot craftier.
The crabs are grabbed swiftly by our fisherman, who’s wearing thick blue gloves. They’re hurled into crates, and as soon as all the crabs are emptied out of one pot, it’s stuffed full of fresh fish bait and gets shoved down the wooden runway, waiting to go back into the sea. I squirm and try to look brave as live crabs whistle past me. As a gesture to his companions at sea, the fisherman chucks a few bits of fish bait to the gulls and the seal. It’s no wonder that seal is so fat.
This methodical routine continues for the next few hours. It’s not so bad, though. Like farming and anything else that’s done outdoors, it can be immensely satisfying. Yes, there are grumbles about EU rules and regulations, but overall this crab fisherman’s job seems straightforward enough. He fishes for what he needs and for the orders he’s given by the wholesalers. He talks about the fact that they always throw the females back if they’re full of eggs, and when small crabs are pulled out of the pots, they’re immediately chucked back into the sea. This is not done for my benefit. The crabs have to be brought back in to have their claws removed, and this can be spot-checked to make sure they’re all old enough to be caught. Fishermen aren’t allowed do it at sea anymore.
As Birgitta Curtin of the Burren Smokehouse and a member of the Taste Council says: “Sustainable fishing that does not harm the environment, fishing that does not over fish but minds the stocking levels – adheres to conservation and fishing in an ethical way. That is what’s ideal.”
You may be familiar with the TV series Fish Fight on Channel 4, and the campaign started by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and backed up by fellow celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to alert people to what’s happening to our seas because of over-fishing and slow-changing EU policies. This caught people’s attention, and more of this needs to be done. It is generally agreed that the CFP (Common Fisheries Policy) is flawed and in 2009 a consultative Green Paper came out that was very honest about the failures of European policy: 88 per cent of the EU’s stocks are overfished, 93 per cent of cod are caught before they can breed, and many EU fishing fleets are barely turning a profit.
Another suggestion is that fishermen should be able to hold individual fishing rights that can be traded, leased or sold. The idea is that this will encourage smaller and more flexible fleets with a vested interest in looking after stocks with a long-term view, as well as dealing with sudden changes in supply because of ecological factors.
It seems as though the smaller fishing boats are more sustainable in that they support a coastal community. If the fishermen can sell directly to restaurants and consumers, they will be able to get the best price, with the shortest route to market.
THE CRAB BOAT I’m on is a great example of sustainable fishing that’s also good for Ireland Inc.In the region of 9,000 tonnes of edible brown crab are caught by Irish fishermen each year, with a value of more than €9 million, making this one of the most important sectors of the Irish fishing industry.
Irish crab is exported to countries throughout Europe and further afield to Dubai and Hong Kong and the industry is of major importance to many coastal communities. There also seems to be no shortage of crabs.
After Joe catches all the crabs he needs, he moves on to the whelks, which are a type of sea snail. They are fantastically weird. They look harmless, with nice shells and bodies that squirm gently, as sweetly as a cartoon slug. But when our fisherman pulls up the pots, which he stuffs with dead crab as bait, he shows us exactly what the whelks do to the crab. They suck out every ounce of the crab meat like some sort of cruel alien vampire. It’s amazing. These soft squidgy creatures in their gorgeous shells make mince meat out of the crabs. I realise I’ve found a crab-hating ally in the ocean, although I’ll leave the anti-crab violence to the whelks.
I finish up my day, a little sunburned despite the slathering on of factor 30. In fact, for several days afterwards, people ask if I have been away skiing. As we are heading in, a cold fog starts to descend and it gets a little rough. Suddenly the responsibility of going out there in bad weather, or conditions that can suddenly turn, brought it home to me how fickle the sea can be. We saw this fisherman’s day at its best. I have no doubt it’s a hard life.
I’m handed a bag of whelks to take home and plan on looking up a few recipes and cooking them for dinner. Whelks have the same sort of texture as tough scallops. But we don’t eat them here, which is a real shame, as there are lots of them. I even think about introducing them in the restaurant in Sandymount.
But then I remember that we put pollack on the menu and nobody ordered it. People are suspicious, even though the price reflects that it’s not cod. But we’ll give it another go. I reckon chippers should definitely use pollack instead of cod. Once it’s cooked, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference and people need to open their minds. Pollack is also known as blossom, which people may like the sound of a little better.
The whelks wriggle around in their bag on the back seat of the car and I suddenly get a pathetic attack of guilt after seeing so many animals die today (even if most of them were evil crabs).
I get home and throw the whelks back in the sea. Six of them look happy to be home. Two look like they’ve croaked it. I feel stupid, utterly, hypocritically stupid. But it doesn’t last long. I get working on a new take on crab cakes the following day and am still searching for that perfect whelk recipe.
