Sudi Pigott: Consider the Anchovy
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What is the premise of Sudi Pigott’s book “Consider the Anchovy”?
Hello and welcome back to Cooking the Books with me Jilly Smith, the podcast which takes us through four food moments from the books of our favourite food writers. It's about all of life through the prism of food. And this week I'm with travel and food writer Sully Piggott to consider the HV.
They have a voracious sexual appetite and like to be at it an awful lot of the time and every kind of three days or so and can spawn up to twenty anchor at a time. And the way they have sex is they stir up the ocean and stir up the the oxygen and the nutrients and so on. So it's really, really good for the sea.
Consider the anchevi is a deep dive into the story of a big hitting little fish. Stuffed with maverick rakish characters, it's a passionate manifesto, making the case for the anchovy as a leading mover and shaker in world culinary history. Rachel Roddy described it as an anchovy odyssey, a journey in search of a small fish of enormous importance, fascinating, unexpected, and utterly enticing. Yeah. I began by asking Sudy in real life what it feels like to get such great feedback on such a nerdy subject.
Well, it feels really exhilarating and well, I it it feels like I've been vindicated by thinking that such a kind of a eccentric recherche idea was a good one.
Well, it's a quite an unusual idea. And I remember you saying ages ago at a supper club that I was hosting at my house, you know, you said, Well, actually I want to tell a story about anchores and I was like, Well, that's niche But actually niche is good, isn't it? I knew in a deep dive into a single subject is actually gold, particularly when you can use it to tell many different stories and you do. So yeah I mean you talk about sustainability, you talk about art. Obviously we are taken with you on this wonderful Odyssey around the world. Is is it the love of travel or is it the love of the answer?
Uh, it it it's both and being very curious and very greedy and it m it involved all the countries that I love most of all. I guess it probably I mean a p I can go way, way back to my love of anchovism, my eccentric great aunt and her making devil's eggs and egg mayonnaise bridge rolls with anchovies. Or I could say that it started When I fell for Couleur in Southwest France because I absolutely adore Matisse, who is a strong motive uh motif in the book. And I w we we went to Couleur because I love Matisse and he painted there when he was feeling disillusioned with life, and that's where he invented f um fovevism, and it happens to be where they're too uh Ange V producers who've been producing anchevies since um the end of the nineteenth century.
And when I saw when I visited their very quirky little family museums that got me really, really interested in the history and realizing people did keep very good records and there were lots of fascinating pictures and artifacts. So that's when it really started And then I realized that People talked about Cantabria and Anchovies being best, but I think even today most people don't even know where Cantabria is, let alone if I mentioned that I just went to an Anchovy festival in Santonia, they just look blank, they don't know where it is at all.
Well it is a great opportunity to travel around the world. Give me a book that takes me around the world vicariously and I am in it and it has been an absolutely glorious read. Um and you actually do say that it started with Homer. Um because well tell us about the Ali Chi De Muni Bena Manaiki Manaika.
Yes, I'm not absolute sure of the pronoun pronoun pronunciation. Everyone seems to have a different take on it. Well, I did first come across those um uh when I went to at the Salon Salone d'Agosto a long, long time ago, um, which was back in ooh, now I'm forgetting. I think it was two thousand and five or six when I went with um Antonio Caluccio and they're one of the Presidia uh products and the Uh fishing and production has literally been the same since Homer wrote about it.
How does Sudi explain the anchovy’s unique reproductive habits and their impact on the ocean?
So classical ancient Greek times. They use a very particular kind of net.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the premise of Sudi Pigott’s book “Consider the Anchovy”?
0:00–4:20
2
How does Sudi explain the anchovy’s unique reproductive habits and their impact on the ocean?
4:20–7:23
3
Why did Sudi feel vindicated by the enthusiastic reception of her niche subject?
7:23–10:11
4
What role did Sudi’s great‑aunt Lily’s anchovy‑filled deviled eggs play in shaping her culinary path?
10:11–13:14
5
How do the traditional anchovy‑producing regions of Cantabria and Santonia differ from modern commercial sourcing?
13:14–16:35
6
What are the sustainability advantages of the centuries‑old anchovy‑catching methods compared with industrial fishing?
16:35–20:13
7
How do tiny coastal communities preserve anchovy‑centric food traditions and a sense of community?
20:13–23:32
8
Why does Sudi advocate eating more anchovies and less salmon, and how does this tie into the book’s broader message?
23:32–26:49