They’re the canny cook’s secret ingredient – an instant flavour-bomb to give so many dishes that elusive oomph. Anchovy-fiend Debora Robertson is lucky enough to live in the part of France that produces the best little fishes for her dishes
RECIPE DEBORA ROBERTSON PHOTOGRAPH TOM SHINGLER FOOD STYLING EMILY GUSSIN
MY COOKING YEAR: APRIL
During our first year living in our new house in France, every spare moment was spent scrubbing a skirting board or digging out the bamboo that had colonised the garden. I imposed this on myself, though – no one was grading me. Why was I doing this? Perhaps now I’d moved to the place I’d always visited on holiday, I was going to extreme lengths to prove to my own puritanical heart that this wasn’t a holiday now, it was real life – and I’d just better pull on my Marigolds and get on with it.
Of course, I’m not as puritanical as all that, and sooner or later – with the emphasis on the sooner – I was inevitably going to take off the Marigolds (size Large, gifts begged from English visitors, my hands being too fat for even the largest French washing up gloves) and play truant from skirting board duty.
On one of those first truanting days, we took off down the coast road, past Narbonne, past Perpignan, to Collioure, the colourful town close to the Spanish border that nestles between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean. It has long been a favourite with artists. Matisse, Dufy and Picasso all spent time there. Vines grow right up to the edges of the town, and it produces some great dry reds and sweet banyuls wines.
But what the town is really famous for is its anchovies, the finest in France. There’s been an anchovy industry here since the Middle Ages, and so important was it that, in 1466, Louis XI exempted the town from paying the hated salt tax, salt being essential to the processing of the fish.
In the 1870s, there were 140 boats and 800 fishermen working the shores of Collioure, but today there remain only two families, the Roques and the Desclaux, whose jars and tins of anchovies grace the shelves of dozens of shops that line the town’s streets. Some of the tins are so beautiful, you don’t want to open them.
The tiny fish are still processed in the traditional way, by hand. First, they are salted for two to three weeks before being gutted. Then they’re salted again and pressed under a weight for three months, before being skinned, deboned and packed in salt, oil or brine.
In many dishes, anchovies provide a deeply savoury back note often undetectable to those who think they don’t care for them (though I remember when m
