Where A Sardine Is A Sardine

An awful lot of sardines get eaten at fiesta time. They are the staple diet of Puerto Alcúdia’s Sant Pere and of Puerto Pollensa’s mini-me Sant Pere, that you might call the Sant Perito. The sardines are trawled and then hauled on to grills for the evening of the “sardinada”; yes, Catalan and Spanish have a word for a sardine nosh-in.

The humble sardine isn’t perhaps the first fish or seafood that springs to mind when it comes to Mallorcan fishy gastronomy. Rather, it is maybe the lobster, the sea bass or other more substantial creatures of the sea. But being humble is something of a virtue for fiesta and fair suppers. Like the rubber-ringed cuttlefish, the sardine is peasant food of the Med, if peasant isn’t a contradiction in this context, which of course it is. Unlike the cuttlefish, unless it is prepared in certain ways, the sardine is uniformly yummy and edible.

The sardine can, though, claim some sort of kudos. It is all down to perception. And marketing. Where the Brits are concerned, that is. Pilchards were once famously rebranded as Cornish sardines by a Cornish pilchard industry desperately seeking to improve sales, and it succeeded in doing so through the simply expedient of renaming the pilchard.

Pilchards are things that come in flat cans with oily tomato sauce and which certainly used to be an extraordinarily cheap source of student sustenance; they were when I was a student anyway. The sardine, albeit that it too can come in a tin and usually does, is altogether more haute cuisine, if by implication of name and nothing else. Sardines and pilchards differ only by size; the former are smaller.

And sardines have acquired haute cuisine status, thanks to Heston Blumenthal, but sardine sorbet is unlikely to be found on the quayside tables of the Mallorcan sardinada. Nor is there likely to be any pilchard-sardine debate. A sardine is a sardine, regardless of size.

It is the lot of the Mallorcans, however, that their sardine should be associated with another island. It is debated as to whether the sardine really does derive its name from Sardinia, but even if it doesn’t, there are certain ties between the islands. Once upon a time, one imagines, there was more physical proximity, but in more recent times, if you can call the sixth century AD recent, Mallorca came under Sardinian control. Mallorca’s Byzantine period found the island administered from across the Med. And more recently than this, Aragonese and later Spanish rule of Sardinia left a Catalan imprint on the language; a variant of Catalan is still spoken on the island.

If the sardine is more originally a native of Sardinian waters, then what about other aspects of the “sardinada”? One is the music. In Puerto Alcúdia at any rate. Each year the fiesta programmes betray an unfailing familiarity, and the musical accompaniment to the sardinada is evidence of this. A group called Sotavent always pitches up to serenade the sardine-munchers. What they play is “havanera”. And this is?

What it isn’t is traditionally Mallorcan. The clue lies in the word. The havanera is derived from Havana. The music is Cuban, and its origins date back to nineteenth century immigration. Why it has become a part of the sardinada, and not just in Alcúdia, is hard to say, other than perhaps a seafaring association between Spain and the Caribbean.

The havanera is an example of how fiestas have embraced elements that are nothing to do with Mallorca or Spain as such. Another is the batucada, the colossal drumming racket that takes place at many a fiesta. It is basically a samba beat, Afro-Brazilian in its roots.

So some of the traditions of the fiestas are not as traditional as they might seem. In the case of sardines, they are a traditional fish of the Med but not of course of Mallorca alone, but more importantly they are sardines, and not pilchards.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.