Vignettes from Jerez: The (mainly) fish market

The Spanish love their fish and whilst it's obvious that big cities like Madrid and Barcelona will have great fish markets (Madrid's is second in the world to Tokyo's) I hadn't banked on a diminutive little town like landlocked Jerez having anything special.  I'd walked past the large covered market building the evening I arrived and had imagined a mixed meat, fish, fruit & veg, and olive market the next morning but not the biggest show of fish I'd ever have seen.

Dozens of mongers with their neat little shops in rows were selling a bewildering array of prawns, shrimps, squid, hake, cod's roes, whelks, langoustines, tuna, the odd John Dory and skate, and a few sharks, big and small.  The customers, mainly older women, were expertly choosing exactly the fish they wanted, sometimes getting the mongers, a mix of men and women, some fairly young, some veritable old fish wives, to pick fish from the bottom of the pile or even doing it themselves.  The mongers would then fillet and cut in the flash of an eye with a very sharp knife.

What a shame that on an island like Britain most towns do not possess one single fishmonger (let alone a proper food market) and that the supermarkets where most food is bought anyway provide a pathetically small choice of fish, most of it ready filleted or smoked or 'previously frozen'.  

 

The central part of the Jerez covered market is totally devoted to fish.  In the stalls around the periphery there are butchers selling a little fresh meat including the odd (wild) bunny and sausages and plenty of preserved meat (in the form of hams and more sausages).  There are greengrocers selling notably knobbly fruit and vegetables, nothing too perfectly smooth and shiny like in the UK.  The odd frutos seccos shop selling nuts and dried fruit and honey too.  And one lone baker selling crap bread, Spain being a curiously bread challenged country.  Here, the Brits might have the edge, Sunblest and Hovis notwithstanding.