Mediterranean Seafood - Prospect Books

92 mediterranean seafood
Red Mullets
The family Mullidae is chiefly represented in the Mediterranean by the two
species listed on pages 94 and 95, for both of which red mullet is the basic
name – or rouget in French and triglia in Italian. The crimson colour is distinctive,
the taste delicate and unique. There are tiny bones, but the enthusiast
quickly learns how to eat his red mullet without this disturbing him.
The family also includes a couple of exotic members in the eastern
Mediterranean: Upeneus asymmetricus Lachner, the golden-striped goatfish,
and Upeneus moluccensis (Bleeker), the golden-banded goatfish. These goatfish
are Indo-pacific species which have migrated into the Mediterranean from
the Red Sea through the Suez Canal. The members of the family which occur
in North American waters and in the Caribbean area (where there are at least
four species) are also called goatfish. The name is appropriate because the
erectile barbels under the fish’s chin, when in the ‘down’ position, give it a
goatlike appearance. Mullus barbatus does not come as far north as Britain,
but Mullus surmuletus does; it is taken in fair quantities in the summer off the
south coast of England, and indeed is present in the English Channel as a
breeding population.
In antiquity the red mullet was one of the most famous and valued fish. Its
name was trigle in Greek, mullus in Latin.* The Greeks displayed a proper
respect for and interest in the fish, and regarded it as sacred to Hecate, but
they did not go mad over it as the Romans seem to have done during the first
century a.d. Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny, Seneca and Suetonius
have left abundant and interesting testimony to the red mullet fever which
began to affect wealthy Romans during the last years of the Republic and
really gripped them in the early Empire. The main symptoms were a preoccupation
with size, the consequent rise to absurd heights of the prices of large
specimens, a habit of keeping red mullet in captivity, and the enjoyment of the
highly specialized aesthetic experience induced by watching the colour of the
dying fish change. This was a strange pastime. It is not clear that many actually
engaged in it. Pliny had evidently never witnessed such a scene when he wrote:
‘The leaders in gastronomy say that a dying mullet shows a large variety of
changing colours, turning pale with a complicated modification of blushing
* An interesting source of confusion arose when the great naturalist Linnaeus, finding that
the red mullet had been classed with the gurnards in a single genus, rightly decided to separate
them. In doing so he left the name mullus to the red mullets, and transferred trigla to
the gurnards (see p. 149), contrary to the ancient usage. The two families are very different,
but the red colour gives them a superficial resemblance and in French, for example, the
name rouget is often applied to gurnards as well as to red mullets.
MediterraneanSeafood.pdf 24 26/06/2012 10:52