‘My dad had two boats built in the 80s, especially for hake. The day they launched, the government put restrictions on the quota because they thought it was overfished.” I regard Sean Perkes, who is a fish merchant in the south Devon port of Brixham, home to the busiest and most diverse fishing market in the UK, with mild, historical sympathy. A terrible story. Did his dad go bust? Not so much, says Perkes’s face. This family have been fishing since the 1500s. It would take more than a quota change to make them go out of business. And in any case, hake stocks have since rebounded, to the point where some people are calling it the new cod.
Measuring fish sustainability is a dark and fascinating art: clearly, you can’t tell whether it is ethical to eat a fish by simply looking at it, nor necessarily by knowing how it’s caught, or even where. Farmed bass, for instance, can be sustainable, but sea-caught bass is not. Sudden spikes in demand, hundreds of miles away, can threaten a species overnight. The Marine Conservation Society (from whom the Guardian takes its lead) and the Marine Stewardship Council don’t always agree, but on hake they’re aligned, and it has been certified sustainable for four years.
Fishing is deeply, bizarrely traditional, yet supremely agile. Mitch Tonks, chef and restaurateur with the famous Seahorse in Dartmouth and Rockfish restaurants in Brixham, Torquay and Plymouth, says: “The fishermen here, when it needs a change, they’ll make a change: to nets, to the way they fish. They’re good engineers.” The business is painfully precarious yet occasionally extraordinarily lucrative. Everyone’s favourite story is the time a boat went out sprat fishing (£200/tonne) and ran into a shoal of anchovies (£2,000/tonne); it netted a million quid. Yet most of the fancy fish will go to Europe, where people don’t baulk at paying £60 for a turbot to eat at home.
In the UK, with our weird seesaw of extravagance and tightness – you would never not buy a round; you would never spend more than a pound on a sausage – we are always looking for the next cod. Not necessarily to taste like cod. Maybe not even to look like cod. Just to cost what cod cost, before it got expensive. And don’t say “haddock”. If there’s one thing professional fish people won’t do, it’s exaggerate – this is perhaps in the interests of maintaining their professional status against the amateur – but when I went to Brixham, all of the restaurants were out of haddock and so, to judge by the auction, was the sea.
Fifteen years ago, hake was in low demand: very cheap, badly looked after and tangled in the nets. Fish that get stuck at the bottom of the catch, while the more valuable specimens are hoiked out, can swirl around as if in a washing machine, and come out bruised. Hake is a very soft fish to start with and has to be treated well. But its status was steadily building, because everyone loves a sea-bargain, so when it became a legitimate choice environmentally, demand grew.
“Cornish” is the kudos word on menus, but the fishing in this bit of the channel, says Tonks, “is the best in the world: huge tides, east to west, twice a day, the fish fighting against them”. An otherwise taciturn figure from Brixham’s Fisherman’s Mission leans in to agree: “I find Cornish fish softer; more watery.” It’s like fish arm-wrestling.
The market starts about 5am, maybe a bit later; I didn’t get there till 6am. The auctioneer goes up in 10p increments per fish, which makes it sound endearing and low-stakes, like playing poker with children. But these stakes are not low, they are deadly serious.
Hake now fetches between £5 and £7 a kilo when it leaves the boats and double that after processing; even after putting in some layers of commerce – merchants, chefs – you still have a fish you could realistically afford to eat.
I doubt you would ever be required to fillet a hake yourself. They are gigantic; up to a metre long, not at all attractive. You get used to thinking things are tastier when they are small, but maturity is prized in a fish. Hake have none of the markings of skate, none of the fiddly detail of a john dory, none of the shades of a red mullet that drive all the fish guys crazy (“It’s just beautiful. Look at that – perfection.”) They’re just a grey, extremely fish-like fish.
If you wanted to attract people to your restaurant, you would not put them in your tank. They are not as attractive even as pike. But there is no denying – even with the ones that have been damaged and are sold without their heads – that this is a fish totally doing its job. It has a beautiful, developed musculature, a structure you could only call classy, wide flakes, glutinously connected.
What this means for cooking it is that almost anything you do makes it look flawless and restaurant-quality. It is impossible to mess up unless you do something foolish: I once baked it, with its skin on, under some potatoes and it looked like a sad trench of the first world war, full of flesh and metal. Pan-fried, it looks like one of those old M&S adverts, “this is not just fish …” It has always been popular in Spain (as well as Argentina and Chile), maybe because it takes hot, punchy flavours incredibly well; nduja, harissa, olives. Yet at the same time, the reason we love it, remember, is that we really love cod, so anything you would do with that, you can also do with hake and it will be the same. Except better.
The Guardian aims to publish recipes for sustainable fish. For ratings in your region, check: UK; Australia; US.
