IT’S small, silvery-grey and caught by fishing fleets everywhere from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. So you would expect it to have several names, but what the pilchard is called has less to do with science or local language than with snobbery, marketing and downright error.
Is this widespread? Yes, the pilchard (alongside the herring, sardine and anchovy) is just one of 73 muddled taxonomic groups spotted by writer Philip Mortenson. In This Is Not a Weasel (Wiley) he tries to bring order to popular cladistic confusions.
What are the problems with the fishy group? They are all members of the order Clupeiformes: sardine and herring belong to the Clupeidae family and anchovy to Engraulididae. But fisherfolk and canners called them whatever came into their heads. “Red-eared sardines” are sardine, sardina, sprat and pilchard. The Japanese call anchovy the half-mouthed sardine.
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Most Europeans use “pilchard” to mean the mature Sardina pilchardus, while keeping “sardine” for the juvenile, but the British appear to believe that “pilchard” is the fish’s proper name – and that it is fit only to be eaten by the lower classes. Last summer sales of humble pilchards leapt tenfold in the UK after their rebranding as “Cornish sardines”.
Mortenson wants a definition that concentrates on the differences between the archetypal species of the two families: Clupea harengus and S. pilchardus. Gourmets may help: they say anchovies caught near the Mediterranean shore taste more delicious than those from the open sea. And it has just been confirmed that there are two anchovy species. But organoleptic analysis got there first. The tongue is mightier than the test tube…
