What I Remember, Volume 2 | Page 9

part of the province. That which concerns Lower Brittany is very imperfect, mainly, I take it, because I had already nearly filled my destined two volumes when I reached it. I find there, however, the following notice of the sardine fishery, which has some interest at the present day. Perhaps the majority of the thousands of English people who nowadays have "sardines" on their breakfast-table every morning are not aware that the contents of a very large number of the little tin boxes which are supposed to contain the delicacy are not sardines at all. They are very excellent little fishes, but not sardines; for the enormously increased demand for them has outstripped the supply. In the days when the following sentences were written sardines might certainly be had in London (as what might not?) at such shops as Fortnum and Mason's, but they were costly, and by no means commonly met with.
On reaching Douarnenez in the summer of 1839 I wrote:--"The whole population and the existence of Douarnenez depend on the sardine fishery. This delicious little fish, which the gourmands of Paris so much delight in, when preserved in oil, and sent to their capital in those little tin boxes whose look must be familiar to all who have frequented the Parisian breakfast-houses" [but is now more familiar to all who have entered any grocers shop throughout the length and breadth of England], "is still more exquisite when eaten fresh on the shores which it frequents. They are caught in immense quantities along the whole of the southern coast of Brittany, and on the western shore of Finisterre as far to the northward as Brest, which, I believe, is the northern limit of the fishery. They come into season about the middle of June, and are then sold in great quantities in all the markets of southern Brittany at two, three, or four sous a dozen, according to the abundance of the fishery and the distance of the market from the coast. I was told that the commerce in sardines along the coast from l'Orient to Brest amounted to three millions of francs annually."
At the present day it must be enormously larger. I remember well the exceeding plentifulness of the little fishes--none of them so large as many of those which now fill the so-called sardine boxes--when I was at Douarnenez in 1839. All the men, women, and children in the place seemed to be feasting upon them all day long. Plates with heaps of them fried and piled up crosswise, like timber in a timber-yard, were to be seen outdoors and indoors, wherever three or four people could be found together. All this was a thing of the past when I revisited Douarnenez in 1866. Every fish was then needed for the tinning business. They were to be had of course by ordering and paying for them, but very few indeed were consumed by the population of the place.
And this subject reminds me of another fishery which I witnessed a few months ago--last March--at Sestri di Ponente, near Genoa. We frequently saw nearly the whole of the fisher population of the place engaged in dragging from the water on to the sands enormously long nets, which had been previously carried out by boats to a distance not more I think than three or four hundred yards from the shore. From these nets, when at last they were landed after an hour or so of continual dragging by a dozen or twenty men and women, were taken huge baskets-full of silvery little fish sparkling in the sun, exactly like whitebait. I had always supposed that whitebait was a specialty of the Thames. Whether an icthyologist would have pronounced the little Sestri fishes to be the same creatures as those which British statesmen consume at Greenwich I cannot say; but we ate them frequently at the hotel under the name of gianchetti, and could find no difference between them and the Greenwich delicacy. The season for them did not seem to last above two or three weeks. The fishermen continued to drag their net, but caught other fishes instead of giancketti. But while it lasted the plenty of them was prodigious. All Sestri was eating them, as all Douarnenez ate sardines in the old days. When the net with its sparkling cargo was dragged up on the sand and the contents were being shovelled into huge baskets to be carried up into the town, the men would take up handfuls of them, fresh, and I suppose still living, from the sea, and plunging their bearded mouths in them, eat them up by hundreds. The children too, irrepressibly thronging round the net, would pick from its meshes the fishes which adhered to them and eat them, as more inland rising generations