The evolution of the Rialto Fish market in Venice from 1970’s through 2000’s -Part 3 -
A traditional “Fritto misto” included small and whole fish, that is “papaline, sardoni, sarde, sfogetti, passarini, moeche, peoci, schie”, in a word local and cheap products. Today you would be surprised to see what touristy restaurants serve for the same dish: mainly frozen fish like calamari rings, scampi tails or prawns, maybe fresh anchovies. Loris added a detail: Scampi were not an ingredient of the Fritto misto. They were caught in Sicily, and due to the large amount of it, they were used to fill the hollow spaces of the wooden boxes loaded with tunas for exportation, so they would stay still.
Scampi looked beautiful, bright orange with long white claws, and were scattered on the fish to attract clients, who weren’t interested in buying, so before closing down scampi were given for free to the last customer. With the time scampi become more expensive, due to their likeness with lobsters and untill ten years ago they were imported from Yogoslavia, where the national authorities were not aware of the quality, which was much better than the Italian ones. With the advent of Croatia, prices went up too much and the importation decreased a lot.
According to Loris, there is another reason why Fritto misto has changed. As I said, it consisted of a combination of different kinds of fish, since traditionally the dish was served “a scotadeo”, that is “hot-finger way”. Fried food has to be eaten when ready, otherwise it gets soggy and looses the flavour. What they did was holding the hot fish with the fingers, open it, take the quill and the tail off, suck the head, and eat the rest with the skin on it! Considering that Lagoon waters were and still are shallow, fish was small, so how can you use knife and fork? Fingers were perfect, although not so fine……… Venetians don’t do it any more!