I’m reporting from my vacation in Lower Franconia. If you are traveling between Würzburg and Nuremberg, there are two classics of Franconian cuisine that you have to order. Of course Schäufele with dumpling, the roast from the pork shoulder is everywhere on the menu. The other is carp Franconian, so baked. It is such a delicacy that it is rarely written to. But the locals know. One evening I heard at the next table: “Have you got carp yet?”
The next evening, at another place, I tried the same way – and I was lucky. The carp season was only just beginning, the landlord later explained to me, that many restaurants have not updated their menus yet.
For baked carp, the fish is halved lengthways, turned in breadcrumbs and then fried. When the plate came with it, I thought of fish fingers. I recently read an article about it, this product is almost 70 years old. It was launched in the United States on October 2, 1953 and was part of a whole line of novel breaded foods in a rectangular shape, including chicken, ham, veal, and eggplant sticks. Only the fish finger remained.
The transformation from fish to pastry solved an important problem at the time: the consequences of overfishing. It wasn’t an ecological issue yet, but it was economical. The engines became more powerful, larger ships, soon to be turned into fish factories, caught catches for which there was no market. It first had to be created and people far from the coast had to be enthusiastic about sea fish. Omega-3 fatty acids were not yet known at the time. At first the fish was frozen in blocks and packed like ice cream, the idea was that the housewife should cut off as much as she needed depending on the number of eaters. But that proved impractical. At General Foods, the idea came up of sawing the blocks up itself – and developed a process for breading and pre-frying frozen food so quickly that it didn’t even thaw in the first place.
In terms of taste, the end product today is more reminiscent of chicken than fish, if at all. The fish that is under the breading has a fantasy name: Alaskan pollock. Pollack, a member of the cod family, has nothing to do with salmon. The carp, on the other hand, is an honest thing. Maybe not everyone likes it, but that’s also the risk if something tastes like something at all.
Carp breeding has a tradition of almost 1,000 years in Franconia. It has never become a popular food fish. Salmon, tuna, the most popular freshwater fish is the trout. The carp also waits in vain for the title of “Fish of the Year”, which has been awarded since 1984. Only Greenpeace has a heart for it and recently voted it the most sustainable fish ever. Otherwise there is a lot of passion for inventing ridiculous names: “Pondbrother” or “Teichschwein”. It used to be justified. The fish now live in much cleaner ponds, and people have learned that they don’t eat mud, they look for larvae and insects, their natural food. This means that the fish do not get so fat, but stay meaty. Long soaking is still worthwhile so that the carp does not bottom out.
In all months with an “r” it’s season, the landlord told me. That is what the carp and the oyster have in common, I notice – not a bad argument either.
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