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Rediscovering Mackerel
Story about the demise of mackerel fishing and consumption in Malta
Joseph Azzopardi and his brothers had been fishing for mackerel – using an old method known as bil-lampara, attracting fish by the light of a gas-lamp – for almost forty years before ruin stared them in the face. “There were thirty fishermen fishing with lamplight about forty years ago,” said Joseph, skipper of the Marinella, a sixteen-metre-long mammoth that cost Lm40,000 second-hand in 1997. “But now people have lost their taste for mackerel. Twelve years ago a box of mackerel sold for Lm20, then it fell to Lm14 by 1996, and today we sell it for Lm4.”
Now the number of mackerel-fishing outfits has dwindled to three, and those three survived only with the advent of tuna-penning farms. Tuna are insatiable eaters of mackerel, and the development of tuna-penning in the late nineties – which are tuna caught in season, fattened in fish-farms and then slaughtered in autumn, when they fetch exorbitant prices in Japan – saved some of mackerel fishermen. “The tuna pens take everything we give them,” Joseph said. “Some years ago they bought six hundred boxes off us, and they said, ‘All these mackerel here, that’s just the starter for hungry tunas’.”
Various species of mackerel are caught in Maltese waters – the Atlantic mackerel (kavall), Chub mackerel (kavall tal-ghajn), Frigate mackerel (tumbrell), and Horse mackerel (sawrell) – and this story deals with the first two, which are rarely distinguished on the market, and look very similar, and which are known with the generic kavall (plural kavalli). They are caught variably from year to year in spring and summer and autumn, and sometimes also in winter; the requirements are calm weather and moonless nights, and they occur most abundantly on the north-western seaboard of Malta, between Valletta and Marsaxlokk, within a few kilometres of the shore.
The Marinella has a crew of ten, and they go fishing for mackerel any night that the weather and moon conditions are right. When the moon is full and bright, the fish can see their way around and disperse, and fewer would be attracted to the lamplight, making a trip unfeasible. Fishing with lamplight is an elaborate operation, and on arrival at the fishing grounds, three small one-man boats are launched from the mother boat, and these boats position themselves about a kilometre apart and another kilometre away from the mother boat. The men in the boat then put on the gas-powered halogen lamps and sit still, waiting for up to two hours for the mackerel to appear, if they do. The light attracts a large concentration of marine insects, and in turn the mackerel swim towards the light for a feeding feast. When a large shoal of mackerel congregate near any of the boats – you can spot them from a distance, breaking and plopping through the surface as they dash for the insects – the skipper confers with his colleagues in the small boats, and they decide to set the net around the boat which reports the largest amount of mackerel.
At this point the other two small boats turn off their lamp, and meet the mother boat about 50 metres from where the mackerel would be. They grab each end of the net each, which is 230 metres long and 90 metres deep, and wound the net around the lamp-bearing boat and the mackerel. The remaining men on board then position themselves in two groups. When the net is in place, they pull the bottom of the net tightly shut, and start winching the net towards the mother boat. As the net draws near, the men in the small boats hold the upper end of the net above the water so that the mackerel can’t escape in the melee that follows as they realise they are trapped.
The men work with silent deftness, everyone falling into role without instruction, and as the net reaches the mother boat, the men scoop mackerel out of the big net with hand-held cooping nets, throwing the fish directly on the deck. Once all the fish are on deck, some men start packing the fish in wooden crates, and the remaining ones spool the net and haul in the small boats. The night I joined the Marinella the catch consisted of 35 ten-kilo crates, a rather poor catch.
“This is our work,” Joseph said. “We don’t do anything for the whole night and then we have to work frantically for two hours.”
The Decline of Mackerel
The decline in mackerel-fishing over the past twenty years was caused as consumers started shunning the fish. The dramatic drop in price as a result is borne in statistics: in 1994, the 9,785 kilos of mackerels at the Fisheries Market brought a price of Lm17,011; in 2001, three times as much were landed (31,762kg) to generate the same value of the 1994 catch, or Lm17,634. The price of mackerel on the market has now stabilised at around Lm2 for a kilo, which consists of three or four fish. But consumers didn’t simply go off mackerel; they switched to substitutes, particularly tuna and swordfish, and as a larger number of fishermen focused on tuna and swordfish, the increasing availability of the latter two further eroded the traditional reliance on mackerel. Additionally, since mackerel fishing requires large crews, the increase in labour costs exacerbated the unfavourable market conditions.
So why do the crew of Marinella cling to mackerel fishing? “It’s what we learned from our father,” Joseph said. “Both my father and his father before him spent their lives fishing with lamplight. I started fishing with my dad when I was thirteen. We were nine siblings and all the three boys in the family are crew.”
Cooking Mackerel
Although not as tender and delicate as many other fishes, mackerels are at least as good as the popular dolphin fishes. The only difference I can make out between the two species is cultural: mackerels, abundant all year round near the shore, have become jaded on people’s palate while dolphin fishes are a migratory fish that is sought after in its short season, and some of Malta’s favourite household fish dishes involve the dolphin fish.
Mackerel has an oily, meaty flesh, and the best way to cook it is to grill it or barbecue it. If I had to eat mackerel five days in a row, I would grill it five days in a row. I like to make three slashes with a knife across the fish’s body on either side as it cooks more thoroughly that way. Then I rub some salt (not much, as the fish is already salty) and some lemon in the slashes, and grill the whole fish on a low flame for about ten minutes on each side.
Mackerel is also one of the fishes best suited for barbecue, especially for non-meat eaters, or to substitute meat. I prepare it the same way I would prepare it for grilling, and then place it on the barbecue rack once the fire has reduced to embers. It needs about 15 minutes cooking on each side, and you know when it’s time to turn it, or when it is ready, when the fish comes off the rack with gentle prodding without the skin coming off.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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