Rounuanuut
Fish Out Of Water
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN
OTHER people's organi- sation always looks the most indescribable con- fusion to the outsider. The men in white coats, the wooden boxes in apparently haphazard heaps,. the metal con- tainers that looked like giant lidless sardine tins—all this I was assured, represents Mac- Fisheries' brand-new up-to-date scheme for bypassing Billingsgate and getting its fish directly from trains on to vans.
Eskimo men, their beads in fleece-lined hel- niets, their duffle coats concealing onion layers q jersey, moved in and out of the deep freeze with fish not due to be distributed that day : to walk into it was like walking into solid glass, clear, horrifying, sharp. We stayed in perhaps thirty seconds, and the bitter dawn outside was a puff of warm air when we came out. A man in a white coat, his clogs shifting on the wet concrete, showed us salmon after magnificent salmon : '1 defy anyone to tell a Scotch one from an Irish one,' he said. We examined lobsters—red ones already boiled for shops with a small demand and no boiler, dark blue ones aggressively alive. The Man in charge casually picked up two waving monsters and showed us how to tell a cock from a hen by, of all things, the corns on its underside.
'Look at that,' said the marketing director, showing us a broi of carefully interlayered Danish plaice finely shrouded in powdery ice. 'They may be three days old, but look.' The plaice's spots Were bright, the blood in their gills even brighter. Keen journalists do not, of course, feel sick at having to peer down a fish's gills at six-thirty in the morning; but a sight I could have done with- out was a metal chest of drawers, the drawers filled with a coiling mass of live eels. After them, even the carp, scaly and revolting, seemed easy work.
Carp, apparently, are sold only in districts with a proportion of Jewish or West Indian people in the neighbourhood (Jewish people, too, insist on fish with heads on, so that they can tell how fresh it is). I was told that you could practically work out where you were by looking at the fish-slab. Haddock implied Scots, hake the West Country or Wales, gurnard the north-east of England, red mullet either West Indians or people who had visited the Mediterranean. The marketing director, a fanatic fish-eater from the east coast himself, says they have an uphill task with psychology, regional and otherwise: women have a feeling that fish are too while and flabby to be fed to their men (like the mistaken idea that the worm in the raspberry is all raspberry, anyway); what fish people eat depends on what was available where they grew up. Fish, it seems, are a lot more international than one might think. Squids from Aberdeen end UP in quantity on the Cate d'Azur; red mullet, fished in the warm .waters off Cornwall or the coast of Spain, go via London to Paris. Mac- Fish2ries tuy perhaps 25 per cent. of their fish abroad—even, though it makes them unpopular in the trade, from Iceland. But the MacFishery view of the British fish trade is not conducive to popularity anyway.
After our Dawn Ordeal it the distribution centre at Finsbury Park, we visited what felt like a very large number of the 236 branches it serves. It was interesting to see that in the Brampton Road they take the skins off the soles before the customer meets them, that in Mount Street there is a man who knows how to bone a turkey, that as managers are allowed to vary their prices to suit the neighbourhood, sprats were Is. 6d. in Knightsbridge, Is. 3d. in Swiss Cottage and Is. is Muswell Hill. It is all the same fish, however; and even if you are the only bream-cater in Cheam you can order it for the next day—a flexibility that does not always go with modern- isation.
One point on which I was inclined to take issue with them was on standardisation. If even rifles come variably off the production line then so must chickens and herrings, and although I see the point about enforcing general standards, I still feel they would get farther with the discriminat- ing if as well as MacChickens and MacDucks they had, as it were, Supermacs—they do, after all, buy pheasants from Mr. Macmillan.
But what appealed to me about all this was that it seemed, at least to my untutored eye, to be enlightened streamlining; and since we can- not very well go back to fishing trout out of the stream at the bottom of the garden, it is some- how more heartening to see something modern- ised intelligently than to find a small untouched corner where a dying process continues un- spoiled. The discussion rages worst, of course, around the question of frozen fish.
All the branches get delivery before nine o'clock; and at that hour the fish that has been deep-frozen is rock hard. But by noon. it will all look 'fresh'; and MacFisheries feel that at least some of the views people hold about frozen fish are wide of the mark--granted that no fish will ever taste as marvellous as one that was alive ten minutes ago, the concept of freshness has changed somewhat by the time we are talking in terms of fish that has already been on the trawler ten days before it hits the Humber. The marketing director felt that the way in which something was deep-frozen was all- important: if it was frozen too slowly, or allowed to get even very slightly unfrozen at the 'handling points,' then it would taste quite dif- ferent from and infinitely worse than a fish dealt with correctly. He may be right : until we have a panel of really respected food experts to decide and comment on such things—brand by brand, process by process—we shall just have to keep on by guess and buy cod, as now.
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