The Little Fish that Packs a Punch
November 26, 2004
Egg sandwiches don’t always have anchovies inside, but they did when I was a kid.
My family has never been terribly devoted to outdoor activities, despite growing up in Calgary with the Rocky Mountains near by. We moved to Calgary from England in 1975. Upon our arrival, my father enrolled the entire family in cross-country skiing lessons. I expect he was thinking that it would be a nice activity for the family to do together in our new very cold home. I spent most of those lessons wrapped around my mother’s leg, which seriously hindered both of our successes at the sport. I think that was the last outdoor sporting activity I remember doing with my family.
Most of my childhood friends’ families were avid skiers and would often go away for the winter weekends to ski at all the nearby (and sometimes not so nearby) ski resorts. My family was different.
Winter was not in our blood like the families who had lived in Calgary all their lives. Our way of thinking was ruled by logic. “If it’s cold outside, why go there?” “If it’s snowing outside, stay inside.”
It wasn’t always winter in Calgary, however, and sometimes in the summer, my family would embark on a hike in the mountains, especially if we had company in town. Sometimes I would bring friends on these hikes, to return the favour of invitations to ski in the winter. On these days, my family was almost like the other families I knew in Calgary. Almost – until lunchtime rolled around. When we un-wrapped the egg and anchovy sandwiches that my father had prepared for us, my family was again relegated to the “resident alien” category. Egg sandwiches were just not supposed to have anchovies in them – at least not in North America. They were, however, delicious.
I have a penchant for salty things. With the amount of salt and salty foods that I eat, I don’t deserve my good blood pressure level. I have always loved anchovies, and as I think about it now, I can trace memories of anchovies throughout all the stages of my life. The egg and anchovy sandwiches made a big and long-lasting first impression, but I also remember eating anchovies on a pizza with my father. He loved anchovies, though my mother did not, so we had to be sure that half the pizza was anchovy-free.
My mother fist described anchovies to me as little salty fish. That’s a pretty good definition of the smallest member of the Herring family really, though perhaps it needs a little more emphasis on the “salty” part. I distinctly recall getting in a lot of trouble from my mother when I used the very same definition in answer to my French exchange friend, offering her an entire anchovy, rolled up to try. Perhaps it was the fact that I squealed with delight at her shocked and screwed up face as she tasted it that angered my mother. Who knows? It was worth it.
When I first started cooking at home, I was particularly fond of one of my mother’s cookbooks – Diane Seed’s Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces. That’s where I first discovered Pasta Putanesca. Legend has it that this quick and fragrant pasta sauce with anchovies, garlic, capers, tomatoes and basil was made by the Italian ladies of the night to feed their families quickly between clients, or to attract new customers, enticing them with its aroma. A great story and a tasty pasta – it has become a classic for me, just as has Caesar salad, but only those prepared in the true fashion, with anchovies.
I didn’t encounter a fresh anchovy until I started working at Zuni Café in San Francisco. There, one of Judy Rogers’ regular dishes is the anchovy plate. It is a work of art, with only 6 ingredients: 6 fresh anchovy fillets, shards of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, sliced celery hearts, Nicoise olives, extra virgin olive oil, and freshly ground black pepper. It is a perfect combination of flavours and textures, precisely arranged. Fresh anchovies are not easy to find because the demand for them is so low. Their flesh bruises easily, but is so tender that you can fillet the little fish with nothing but your fingers.
Most of us find anchovies in our grocery stores, packed in olive oil. At Italian markets and other gourmet retail stores, however, you can find anchovies packed in salt. These tend to be more expensive, but they have a meatier, more intense flavour and a much better texture. The best thing is to find a place that sells them in bulk and will sell you only as many as you need. Once you open a jar of salted anchovies, they deteriorate rapidly. If you don’t eat them all at once, wash the salt off with water and store these in olive oil.
One of my most delicious memories of enjoying anchovies was again with my father. While at home in France, he had found green olives that were stuffed with anchovies. I remember thinking that these were a precious commodity, not to be taken lightly or eaten freely. Not only was that particular brand hard to come by, but imagine all the work that went into stuffing an olive with a tiny rolled up anchovy fillet! Whose job was that, and how much were they being paid?! I cherished these olives with my father. Today, you can search the web and find several brands of such olives. That has taken away some of the allure of anchovy stuffed olives for me, but it is still a treat that no true anchovy lover should or could turn down.
So it seems my father has been at the beginning and the end of my anchovy recollections. Indeed, it’s no surprise that both my parents are intertwined in most of my food memories. My family is, as I’ve previously mentioned, a family of eaters. Dad was on to something back then, however, during our summer hikes in the Rocky Mountains. His old egg and anchovy sandwiches are now creating a stir at ‘wichcraft, Tom Colicchio’s high end sandwich joint in New York City where you can get a sandwich with “Marinated white anchovies, soft-cooked egg, roasted onion and frisée on country bread” for $8 . So tell us, Dad, what’s next?
Herring salad, of course.