Brown Trout and Blue Mussels: June 2010

Pilgrim on the Seafood Path

Seville is roughly 100 kilometers upriver from the Guadalquivir River estuary (recommended listening: Patricia Vonne, who relates in one song on the album Guitars and Castanets that her younger sister ran away to join the flamenco artists on the Triana side of the river). Which would be on the coast on the west, or Atlantic side, of the Gibraltar Straits. I know this because it struck me that the tide range in the river at Seville was far greater than it ought to be in the Mediterranean. I figure it’s a draw, since I at least knew the Mediterranean tides, effectively countering my dim understanding of Iberian geography.

Seville may not be on the sea coast, but it is a seafood paradise. Every restaurant, cafe, and bar has the day’s fish and shellfish offerings proudly displayed on ice.

There’s your sharks. These look

like dogfish or other small,

abundant coastal and/or

estuarine species. Probably

not a major conservation deal

in marketing these, I’m guessing.

And your tiny snails on the hoof. Given

that these appear to be terrestrial, it

is something of a stretch to lump them

with “seafood”, but there’s really not a

category for “land-based mollusks”

that I know of.

Barracuda. I don’t know if they have

the same bioaccumulated toxins problem

in the Atlantic or Mediterranean that they

have in the Pacific. Of course, I’m assuming

that these fish didn’t arrive by plane from

the Pacific... .

These look like red snapper and sardines

to me. Although red mullet and small

mackerel are conceivable.

Here’s yer assorted seafood under glass

near the entrance to the bar. Note especially

the many and wondrous varieties of

prawns. And this is only a fraction of the total

species available.

Ya got yer Murex whelks laid out for retail

sale in a tavern.

And the same animals in the rather more

wholesale-looking seafood market in Triana.

It occurred to me to monitor the turnover in

the seafood purveyed in one of the bars we

frequented several nights over the course of the

week. This grouper greeted us on Saturday and

was still there on Thursday.

Which I’m guessing explains the persistence of

this spooky looking feral cat hanging around the

block that said grouper-retaining establishment occupied.

And don’t forget to surf on over to http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for the latest in preposterous speculation in art, architecture, and science.

When I was an undergrad, I was an idiot. And those of you scratching your puzzled brow and thinking “so what’s new” have no idea. Compared to the idiot I am now, I was a far more seriously, intensely, dangerously self-destructive idiot.

And, as much as I’d like to claim credit for the transition from “seriously, intensely, etc.” idiocy to my present state of dysfunctional semi-idiocy, I’m afraid I can’t. In fact, in my case, college did the job it was designed to do. It helped me grow up.

Among the things that saved me from my post-adolescent self in the dim depths of the 1970s was Bob Loveland’s course in Marine Biology. Loveland was a very, very good teacher. Loved his subject, knew a lot about it, conveyed his excitement for the rigorous details as keys to the Big Concepts.

Marine Bio was a Big Course. 5 credits, 3 for lecture, 2 for lab, 2 long lab periods every week along with 3 lectures. Our first collecting trip was a most-of-a-day bus ride to the jetty along the Shark River inlet at Belmar and Avon.

It was a chilly October afternoon. We were a dozen or so undergrads and a couple of grad students. The task was to collect sufficient interesting invertebrates to let us work through identification keys and gain some understanding of evolutionary biodiversity in the Atlantic nearshore.

Tide was high, and, as I say, the wind was cold. For a couple hours we dipped nets and leaned down into the rocks to retrieve what mollusks and crustaceans we could. Pretty meager pickings. Presently I started retrieving specimens those with more sense pointed out from the relatively dry top of the jetty. Pretty soon I was full in the water, swimming around the submerged boulders and handing up buckets and nets full of urchins, sea squirts, mussels, and periwinkles. Near dark, I spotted a spider crab the size of my hand parked in a crevice. I asked the nearest grad student if spider crabs had any weaponry worth worrying about. He said “There’s only one way to find out”. So I reached in and grabbed it. Of course, its soft cuticle and sluggish demeanor rendered it harmless. I snagged a couple others before having to pile onto the bus in cold, soaked clothing.

I asked the grad students if spider crabs were edible. They opined that it was likely, but they never heard of anyone eating them, and that there was “only one way to find out.”

Since then, I’ve seen spider crab looking things in Italian cookbooks, with notes indicating that they are delicious and need only a squirt of lemon to make a first-class meal. Never had the opportunity to test that theory.

Until Spain. I got separated from our small group hiking through the medieval alleys of Old City Seville, and Cathy finally hunted me down. At that point we had no clue where Brian and Tim might be. So we found an outdoor table at a place serving cold beer, and ordered gazpacho, Serrano ham, and aged Manchego cheese. I spotted 2 big spider crabs on ice under the counter, and established that they were priced by weight. I ordered one, a honkin’ 600 grams, or 18 Euros worth.

It took a while to prepare. Meantime, the waitress brought what looked like 19th century surgical tools and left them on the table in preparation.

Stainless steel surgical tools for

dealing with a massive spider

crab appetizer.

Eventually the beautifully cooked and cooled crab arrived, and I got to work with the surgical tools.

Spider crab ready to eat.

Turns out, spider crabs are in fact “edible”. However, they have very little muscle crammed into that carapace. After an hour or so, I had extracted what little meat I could from the carcass and we headed off to the hotel.