The best anchovy you have ever eaten did not taste like an anchovy. It was dissolved into a Caesar dressing, melted into the base of a puttanesca, or whisked into the butter spooned over a steak. It was the second ingredient in that Worcestershire sauce you shook into a Bloody Mary, present as pure savor and nothing you could name. This is the strange position the anchovy holds. It is one of the most widely eaten fish in the world, and most of the time you eat it, you have no idea it is there.
That is because the anchovy is not really a fish you eat. It is a fish you use. Fresh, Engraulis encrasicolus is a small, oily, fast-spoiling thing, unremarkable and gone within a day of the catch. What makes it the anchovy is what happens over eight to eighteen months buried in salt, packed in barrels, left while its own enzymes take the flesh apart and then rebuild it into something else. The proteins break down into glutamates, which is pure savoriness, the raw chemistry of umami. What comes out of the barrel is not so much preserved fish as it is a concentrate of the sea, or a seasoning that happens to have a spine.
People have been performing this trick for a very long time. The Romans built an empire's condiment on it: garum, a sauce of anchovies and other small fish fermented in salt, traded the length of the Mediterranean in clay amphorae, poured over nearly everything at the table. It carried its savor from the same glutamates a modern cured anchovy does, and it was made in factories whose stone vats still sit on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain, at the very edge of the same waters that later became the world's anchovy heartland. Garum never fully died. Its direct descendant, colatura di alici, is still made from salted anchovies in Campania today. The idea that a rotting little fish could be turned into the backbone of cooking is two thousand years old.
What changed in the modern era was not the cure but the container. For most of that long history the salted anchovy was a whole, bony, and forbidding thing. Sold packed in salt, to be rinsed, split, boned by hand at the moment of eating. It was closer to a raw ingredient than a finished food. Then, in 1883, in the small Cantabrian town of Santoña, a Sicilian named Giovanni Vella Scaliota worked out how to skip the labor. Vella had come north three years earlier, sent by a Neapolitan firm to salt fish, and grew tired of the cleaning ritual. He did it in the factory instead: boned the cured fish into two clean fillets, packed them in oil, and sealed them ready to eat. Sold the first ones under the name La Dolores, after the Santoña woman he had married. The Italians had brought the salting north; Vella added the oil and the tin.
The town he did it in turned out to be the perfect place for it. The anchovies of the Bay of Biscay, feeding in colder, rougher, more plankton-rich water than their Mediterranean cousins, carry more fat with a firmer flesh and they take the long salt cure better than anchovies from anywhere else. Local families took up Vella's method, and within a few decades Santoña and its neighbors along the Cantabrian coast had become the source of the finest tinned anchovies in the world. The work is still being done largely by hand. In Santoña the women who fillet the cured fish, the sobadoras, learn the exact point of a properly matured anchovy by touch, a skill passed down from mother to daughter, and it is their hands, not a machine, that produce the clean intact fillets the best tins are known for.
There is one more knot worth untangling, because it trips up nearly everyone. The anchoa and the boquerón are the same animal. In the salt-cured, oil-packed form from the Cantabrian north it is anchoa, the dark, deep, savory fillet. When marinated fresh in vinegar and oil, pale and sharp and mild, the very same fish is a boquerón. Same species, opposite preparations, and the difference is entirely in what was done to it after the catch. It is the clearest possible lesson in the thing this whole newsletter keeps circling: with tinned fish you are almost never buying the fish, you are buying the method.
The anchovy sits at the end of a very long chain. A Mediterranean bait-fish, cured the better part of a year, filleted by hand, sealed in oil by a trick a homesick Sicilian worked out in a Spanish fishing town a hundred and forty years ago, itself the descendant of a Roman sauce two thousand years older than that. You have eaten its work a hundred times without once meeting it directly. It is worth, at least once, buying a good tin and tasting the fish alone, on bread, with a little of its own oil, and no dressing to disappear into. The backbone of everything, for once in the foreground.
