Let them eat hake

Why, I wonder, is a fish revered in one European country yet largely ignored in the others? As a fish of the Atlantic, and other cold waters, hake is little known in exclusively Mediterranean countries. Nor is it hugely popular in France, where it is called by one of three names — merlu, merluche, colin — suggesting that the French are unsure about it. Hake is certainly available here but a lot of the British catch is sold to the country which really can’t get enough of it. This, of course, is Spain, where hake (merluza) is the national fish. And when one considers that the Spaniards eat about four times more fish per head than we do, the question arises whether there is enough hake in European waters to satisfy this enormous demand.

According to the Marine Conservation Society, there isn’t. Hake stocks are ‘outside safe biological limits and overfished’. Many people have little respect for the practices of Spanish fishermen, assuming that they will go on hoovering hake from the seas around Europe until the stocks collapse irretrievably. It is not, of course, in Spain’s interests to kill off this source of supply, and the TAC (Total Allowable Catch) has not in fact varied much over the past two years (in the North Sea it has been doubled). At the same time, Spanish boats go farther afield to meet the demand for hake. There are fisheries in the Atlantic off the north African coast, off Namibia, and in South America off Chile. Much of it is sold frozen in packs, allowing the supermarket shopper to choose from hake steaks, hake centre cuts, hake tail pieces, hake fillets with skin, hake fillets without skin.