Menaica Anchovies

Menaica is a net, not a fish. The anchovy is Engraulis encrasicolus, exactly the same species landed at Cetara, in Liguria or in Sicily. What changes is the catching, and the catching changes everything downstream.

The menaica (spelled menaide or minaica depending on the village) is a wide-mesh drifting gillnet, set at dusk and left to travel with the current. Small anchovies swim straight through it. Only fish above about thirteen or fourteen centimetres are caught, and they are caught by the gills. That produces the first consequence: the fish dies in the net and bleeds into the sea. By the time it comes aboard it is already bled, so the flesh never takes on the reddish-brown colour you see in anchovies caught by purse seine, where tonnes of fish are compressed together inside the bag of the net.

The second consequence is labour. Anchovies held in a mesh cannot be tipped onto the deck; each one has to be pulled from the net by hand. Four men on a ten-metre boat land about a hundred kilos on a good night. A light-boat purse seiner does ten times that in an hour. The technique survives because the product justifies it, not because it makes economic sense.

Menaica has been a Slow Food Presidium since 2001. The surviving boats can be counted on one hand, almost all at Marina di Pisciotta, and every spring the same question returns: how many crews will go out.

Cleaner and sweeter than any anchovy most people have eaten. Salt-cured anchovy usually carries a metallic, faintly bloody edge underneath the salt; menaica anchovies have almost none of it, because the blood left the fish in the water.

What is left reads as savoury rather than fishy (closer to cured pork or good butter than to the sharp brown fillets on a pizza), with a long mineral finish and none of that scouring saltiness at the back of the throat.

The texture is firm and slightly meaty. These are large fish, so the fillet holds together on the fork and eats as a mouthful rather than as a seasoning. The colour says the same thing before you taste it: ivory white with a faint pink line along the spine, not brown.

Do not melt these in a pan. That is what cheap anchovies are for, and using menaica that way is like frying jamon iberico. Rinse the salt off under cold water, pat dry, dress with good olive oil, and let them sit twenty minutes.

Then: bread. A slice of durum wheat bread, olive oil, two fillets on top, and if you want to eat it the way the Cilento does, a shaving of cacioricotta, the local half-goat, half-sheep cheese. Warm focaccia works. Ripe tomatoes with oregano work. Cold butter works, though that is Spanish rather than Italian.

Where they enter a cooked dish they enter at the end: over pasta finished with toasted breadcrumbs, over roasted peppers still warm, alongside sauteed bitter greens. Two fillets season a plate for four, so hold the salt until you have tasted.

If you are in Pisciotta in season, the fresh fish is cooked three ways. Mbuttunate, butterflied and stuffed with breadcrumbs, garlic, parsley and egg, then cooked with cherry tomatoes. Nfurnate, arranged in a dish with oil, oregano and lemon and baked for ten minutes. Or marinated in lemon juice, for which the fish must first be frozen at minus eighteen for at least ninety-six hours, an Italian legal requirement against anisakis, and a sensible one anywhere.

A sealed jar under salt keeps twelve to eighteen months in a cool cupboard, to the date the producer prints on it. After opening, lift out the fish you need, press the salt back flat over the ones that remain, close the jar and keep it in the fridge, where it holds for months. The single rule is that no fish is left uncovered: anything standing above the salt darkens and dries.

Fillets in oil, once opened, have to stay completely submerged, because whatever sits above the surface oxidises and browns. Move them into a smaller container, top up with oil, refrigerate, and work through them in seven to ten days.

Fresh anchovies are cleaned and cooked the same day, or frozen cleaned in flat portions, where they hold two or three months. The fat of oily fish oxidises fast, so freezer time counts for more here than with other proteins. White crystals that sometimes appear on salted fish are amino acids, usually tyrosine, formed over a long maturation.

Colour is the signature. A well salted menaica anchovy is pale: ivory white, with at most a pink shadow along the backbone. A fillet that is brown or brick red was caught another way, which is not a fault in itself, but it is not menaica.

Size is the second check. The wide mesh of the net does the selecting: the fish worked run thirteen to fifteen centimetres, and once cleaned they give long, broad fillets. Narrow, short fillets come from small fish, and the menaica net lets small fish through.

Third, the format. They are sold already headed and gutted, under salt in glass jars or in oil in small jars, almost never in large tins. The label should name the fisherman or the workshop and Marina di Pisciotta, and the Slow Food Presidium mark, where it appears, points to a producer inside the protocol.

Last, price. Below roughly fifty euro a kilo the arithmetic does not work, because the cost is hands pulling each fish out of the net one at a time. Menaica is not a protected term and labels use it loosely.

This is a genuinely scarce product: a whole season yields a few tonnes, most of it sold within Campania. Outside Italy, expect intermittent availability rather than a shelf listing.

The most reliable route is buying direct from the Slow Food Presidium producers at Marina di Pisciotta, several of whom ship within the EU. In the UK and the US, the specialist Italian importers that carry colatura di alici and single-estate oil list menaica anchovies when they can get them, and sell out. Ask a serious delicatessen to source it rather than hoping to find it on a shelf.

Prices run roughly 55 to 90 euros per kilo of drained fish, which is about 29 to 45 dollars per pound in the US and 50 to 78 pounds per kilo in the UK. A 200-gram jar under salt sits between 14 and 22 euros.

On the label, look for the producer's name and Marina di Pisciotta, and for fish sold headless and gutted: menaica anchovies are always cleaned at sea, so whole heads-on fish in a jar is a different product. Menaica is not a protected designation, so the word alone guarantees nothing. Colour is the honest test: white, not brown.

Marina di Pisciotta, in the province of Salerno, is a handful of houses around a small harbour inside the Cilento National Park. A few restaurants on the quay cook the whole repertoire, and in August the village holds its anchovy festival: the easiest way to eat everything at once.

The wider Cilento earns the drive on its own terms. Pisciotta, above the harbour, sits among centuries-old olive trees of the local pisciottana variety; Ascea has the Greek ruins of Velia; Palinuro and Camerota lie south along a coast with very little sand and very clear water. At Pioppi, in the comune of Pollica, Ancel Keys spent decades studying what people here ate, which is how the Mediterranean diet became a category: there is a small museum.

Ninety minutes north, Cetara does the opposite thing with the same fish and is worth the contrast. Naples, two hours away, is where salted anchovy turns up in everything from pizza to braised escarole.