The Cantabrian Sea That Made Anchovy A Word
An Almanac essay on the Spanish coast that taught the world how to cure fish
Lead Long-Form Editorial · Releone Almanac · Issue One
There is a stretch of Spanish coastline, north and west, where the Atlantic does something different. The water is colder than the Mediterranean. The fish are different. The boats come in early. The smoke from the canneries has the same shape every morning. They have been making anchovies on this coast since the Romans gave them the word.
The word is anchovy. Not the fish. The fish has a hundred names in the languages around the basin. The cure — the salt, the time, the tin or the glass — is the contribution. It is what turned a small silver fish that swims in tens of millions on the Cantabrian shelf into something a man in Lyon, a woman in Tokyo, a chef in Miami can taste, and recognize, and want again.
The Romans called the cure garum. They built warehouses on this coast for it. The fish-paste in the amphorae traveled the empire. The empire fell. The cure remained. The word changed. The work did not. There are warehouses on this coast today — small ones, family ones — that do the same thing. Fewer fish. Better fish. Less of them. More care. The same instinct. The same hands.
What is in a Cantabrian anchovy
The fish is Engraulis encrasicolus. The European anchovy. It has, in good years, a population on the Cantabrian shelf in the mid-billions. In bad years, much less. The shelf is a coastal ecosystem rich in plankton and small organisms; the anchovy that lives there has a deeper fat content than its cousins in the Mediterranean. Fat is what cures well. Fat is what the salt finds and slowly transforms. The Cantabrian anchovy is fat in a way the Mediterranean anchovy is not. This is the structural reason the Cantabrian cure has earned its reputation. It is not that the fishermen are better, though they often are. It is that the fish has more to work with.
The catch happens in spring. April, May, into June. The Spanish quota is set seasonally, with a hard limit and a brief opening. The boats go out at dawn, return midday. The anchovies are landed silver, alive, weighing a few grams each. They are taken to the cannery within hours. Time matters here at a level the supermarket aisle cannot communicate. An anchovy that has been on ice for a day cures one way. An anchovy that has been on ice for an hour cures another. The difference is what the customer pays for.
The cleaning is by hand. There is no machine that does it well. A woman — almost always a woman, in this region, often a woman whose mother and grandmother did the same — sits at a stone counter with a small knife. She removes the head, the spine, the small bones that hide along the dorsal line. She works in cold rooms. The cure begins with salt — coarse Mediterranean sea-salt, layered with the fish in clay or glass. It rests. It rests for months, sometimes longer. When the salt has done its work, the anchovies are removed, rinsed, dried, and packed in olive oil. Italian extra virgin, traditionally. Sometimes Spanish. The oil is the second layer of preservation and the first layer of palate.
A jar of finished Cantabrian anchovies, properly made, is a paragraph of compressed time. Salt, oil, fish, hands, months. Open it and you taste all of them.
What we got wrong about anchovies
The American supermarket palate has spent a generation believing it does not like anchovies. This is not because the American palate dislikes the fish. It is because the American supermarket palate has rarely encountered the fish; it has encountered a tin of small, harshly-cured, low-fat European or South American anchovy at a price that did not permit the cure to be done correctly.
The same is true of olive oil. The same is true of tinned tuna. The American premium-food revival of the last decade — Ortiz coming into Whole Foods, Conservas Hoya finding their way to Eataly, Wild Planet's serious-tuna program — has slowly retrained the palate. People who used to scrape anchovies off their pizza now eat them on toast with butter. People who used to cook with the cheapest olive oil now know which press in Tuscany to buy from. People are paying twenty-six dollars for a jar of fish that thirty years ago would have read as absurd.
It is not absurd. It is the corrected understanding of what the food costs to do correctly. The supermarket pricing was the absurdity.
Releone's relationship to this coast
We do not own a fishery. We will not. Owning a fishery would change the way we relate to the people who have been doing this for generations. We are not better at it than they are. We are what they need: a brand that translates the value of their work to a market that has been undervaluing it.
Our anchovies come from a single family-owned fishery on the Asturias coast. Their boats. Their hands. Their cure. Releone's role is the brand and the glass — the visible glass jar, the gold lion, the New York operating discipline that ensures every jar that leaves their cannery and lands in a Bergdorf food hall has the same fish quality the family puts into the jar they keep for themselves.
We pay above the market rate. We have a multi-year contract with price-protection on both sides. We do not negotiate downward. We negotiate the relationship to last decades.
The first time you open a Releone Cantabrian anchovy jar, you are tasting two centuries of Asturian fish-curing tradition through a New York-clean luxury frame. That is the sentence we want every Cantabrian anchovy customer to write in their head when the lid releases.
How to actually eat one
Open the jar. Drain the oil into a small bowl — not the sink. The oil has cured with the anchovy and is now a flavored oil, suitable for a salad dressing, a finishing drizzle, a piece of bread.
Take one anchovy with a fork. Place it on a piece of warm sourdough that has been spread with cold European butter. Salt-on-fat-on-toast is the simplest expression. The anchovy provides the salt; the butter provides the fat; the bread provides the structure. Add a quarter-twist of black pepper. That is dinner.
If you are cooking, the anchovy melts into hot olive oil at the start of any pasta sauce — it disappears, and what is left is a savory backbone the dish would not have without it. The Italians call this colatura. The English used to call it Worcestershire sauce and got the wrong end of the stick.
If you are hosting, layer two anchovies on a sliced hard-boiled egg with a drop of olive oil, a few capers, a thin slice of Sicilian lemon. The dish has a name in three languages. None of them needs translating.
A small heritage note
The Cantabrian Sea, in Spanish, is Mar Cantábrico. The name comes from the Cantabri, a pre-Roman tribe who inhabited the region and resisted Roman conquest for two centuries before Augustus finally subdued them in 19 BC. The Romans gave the tribe a coastline and the coastline a name. The name has outlasted the tribe by two thousand years.
The fish has outlasted both.
This is the second piece in the Releone Almanac launch corpus. Recipes for anchovy preparation across nine traditions are catalogued at /almanac/recipes/anchovy. The producer credit on Releone Cantabrian Anchovies is documented at /collection/cantabrian-anchovies. Subscribe to receive future Almanac pieces in print: /almanac/subscribe.