Carp is a fish most of us don't often come across. Some never. Anyway, it came to mind on reading that Lord LloydWebber, better known before elevation as Andrew Lloyd Webber, has an estate in Hampshire with a lake which was stocked with 7,000 of these fish. Was. He now has 250 only, due to the predation of cormorants. He is quoted in Country Life as saying that carp is a lovely fish "tastes a bit earthy" and is best marinated in onions in the Hungarian style. The lake was mentioned in the Domesday Book as having been formed out of fishponds belonging to Romsey Abbey.
And that's where faint memories of carp stir in the mind. Was not this fish a staple of the monastic diet; and was it not the fish that glided around the moated castles of continental stately piles especially? Is there a faint memory of fish as round and big as pigs, surfacing occasionally, to the delight of tourist parties being introduced to some French castle?
Anyway, the fish lost to Lloyd Webber can only have been youthful. Cormorants can manage only so much. (One, of the heaviest loads of even these voracious predators is recorded by the 19th century shooting man Sir Ralph Payne Gallwey. "I have shot a cormorant that could not fly, and taken a trout out of its body nearly three pounds in weight, which explained the cause of its inactivity.") But while Lloyd Webber's lost fish must have been at least within the three pound limit, the fish can grow and grow. Mrs Beeton, who always liked to give a little colourful background to the creatures she uses in the kitchen, claims that the carp has been found to live to 150 years and then briskly tells us how to bake, stew and fry it.
One of the most enlightening contributions to our knowledge of carp is contained in several selections from Jeremy Paxman's "Fish, Fishing and The Meaning of Life" (Penguin) with two hilarious or fill in your own adjective accounts of incidents. One features a 44 pounder. In another a carp known as the Bishop, which had been caught and ritually returned to the water seven years before, now lay on the grass and weighed in at 51 lbs 6 oz. Marvellous? Daft? And then there's the story of two carp fed on brandy. Do you laugh at any of this? Paxman's book is a wonderful anthology. Learned and chosen with perception and wit.