Cantabrian Anchovies

A Cantabrian anchovy is not a different fish. It is Engraulis encrasicolus, the same species landed at Cetara, in Sicily and along the Ligurian coast. What differs is the water, the season and the size of fish the processors are willing to work with.

The Cantabrian Sea is cold and plankton-rich. Anchovies caught there in spring, just before spawning, are large and fat: fifteen to eighteen centimetres, against ten or twelve for a Mediterranean summer catch. The fat is what matters: it keeps the flesh soft through months under salt instead of drying it into fibres. The size is what you see, a fillet a centimetre and a half wide that lifts out whole rather than shredding.

The Spanish call the fresh fish bocarte, and the cured product anchoa. In Italian, acciuga and alice are the same word twice, split by region: alice in the south, acciuga in the north.

One thing worth knowing before you pay: "Cantabrian" is not a protected designation. There is a local guarantee mark for Anchoa de Santoña, but on most tins the phrase legally describes a very large fishing zone. The name sells, so it gets used generously.

Deeply savoury rather than fishy, and much less salty than the anchovies most people know from a pizza. The first impression is meat, not sea: something between cured ham and butter, with a long umami finish that sits at the back of the palate.

The texture is the giveaway. A good Cantabrian fillet is soft and dense at once, silky, and it dissolves slowly. A cheap anchovy is stringy, aggressively salty, and gone in a second, leaving only salt behind.

Melted into hot oil it disappears entirely and leaves the dish tasting more of itself, since anchovy used this way is not detectable as fish, which is why people who swear they hate anchovies eat them constantly without knowing.

Salt-packed anchovies you rinse yourself taste sharper, more mineral and more assertive: better in a long-cooked sauce, less pleasant on their own.

The best fillets are not an ingredient, they are a dish. Cold butter on good bread, two fillets on top, nothing else. That is the Spanish way and it has never been improved on. Pan con tomate works equally well, as does a slab of warm Genoese focaccia.

Where they are cooked, the rule is one line long: melt them in warm, not smoking, olive oil over low heat until they dissolve completely. From there you have spaghetti with anchovy and breadcrumbs, broccoli or chicory sauteed with garlic and chilli, roasted peppers, or a tray of potatoes that suddenly tastes of something.

They are the backbone of the Roman puntarelle dressing, pounded with garlic and vinegar into a cream, and of Piedmontese bagna cauda, though bagna cauda traditionally uses salt-packed fish, which stands up better to an hour of cooking.

The single rule that matters: do not salt the dish until you have tasted it. Two fillets will season a pan of greens for four people.

A sealed tin keeps below 18 °C for a year or two, and the date printed on it is the reference; serious producers ask for the fridge even before opening, because warmth lets the maturation continue inside the tin and the fillets go soft and start to flake. Once opened, the fillets have to stay completely under the oil. Anything standing above the surface oxidises and darkens within a day. Move them into a small container so the oil covers them properly, top it up, keep it in the fridge, and reckon on seven to ten days.

Salt packed anchovies work on a different regime. The sealed jar sits in the cupboard for a year or two; after opening, lift out only the fish you need, press the salt back over the ones that remain, close the jar and keep it in the fridge, where it holds for months as long as the salt cover is never broken. One thing that surprises people: the small white crystals that sometimes appear on salt packed anchovies are amino acid crystals, usually tyrosine, and they form during long maturation rather than being undissolved salt.

Colour says most of it. A properly matured fillet is an even brownish pink. Grey or whitish means the maturation was cut short; brick red or nearly orange means it was pushed, or the fillet oxidised. Size says the rest: a high grade Cantabrian fillet is about a centimetre and a half wide and seven or eight long, and it lifts on a fork without breaking in half. Narrow, pale fillets are small fish, summer caught or low grade. There should not be a single bone left, since bones pulled with tweezers are the evidence of hand filleting.

On a shop shelf the neighbours are easy to mix up. Ordinary tinned anchovies are machine filleted, usually from Morocco or Peru, packed in sunflower oil and priced accordingly. Boquerones, the white ones, are cured in vinegar rather than salt and are a mild, different thing. Two checks work anywhere: drained weight against net weight, which falls below sixty per cent in cheap tins, and the price. Hand worked Cantabrian anchovies do not exist below roughly $8 to $10 for a 50 g tin, and if they cost what the others cost, they are the others.

In the US, Spanish specialists carry the real thing: La Tienda, Despana in New York and Zingerman's all list Santoña producers such as Ortiz, Nardin and Don Bocarte, while Gustiamo and Eataly carry both Cantabrian fillets and Italian salt-packed anchovies. Expect 45 to 80 dollars per pound of drained weight at the top tier, in practice 9 to 18 dollars for a 50-gram tin.

In the UK, Brindisa is the established Spanish importer, and Sous Chef, Ocado and Italian delicatessens carry both formats, at roughly 70 to 140 pounds per kilo drained.

What to check on the label: drained weight against net weight (under about 60 per cent is a bad sign); the oil, since "olive oil" and "extra virgin olive oil" are not the same line item; and the fillet count, since fewer, larger fillets mean bigger fish.

If a tin is priced like supermarket anchovies, it is supermarket anchovies. Hand filleting has a floor. For cooking rather than eating plain, buy Italian salt-packed anchovies in a half-kilo jar instead: a third of the price, years of shelf life, and better in a hot pan.

In Italy, Cetara on the Amalfi Coast is the obvious pilgrimage: a small working port that lives on anchovies, where trattorie serve pasta with colatura and marinated alici within sight of the curing rooms.

In Liguria, Monterosso al Mare in the Cinque Terre has a salting tradition recognised as a Slow Food Presidium and an anchovy festival in September. Camogli fries fish in a giant pan on the harbour on the second Sunday of May: pure spectacle, real fish. In Genoa, anchovies turn up in the focaccia, in torta pasqualina and on the fish counters of the Mercato Orientale.

For the Cantabrian product at source you have to leave Italy for Santoña, in Cantabria, where the spring anchovy days are held and most of the small workshops sell directly. Laredo and Colindres are a few kilometres away and do the same thing without the visitors. In San Sebastian, an hour east, the pintxo bars of the Parte Vieja serve single fillets on bread as a matter of course. For the fresh fish rather than the cured one, go between April and June on the Atlantic side.