Bogue, the underdog of fishes

By Dimitra Mylona.

This post is about a fish with a funny scientific name: Boops boops.  In English it is known as bogue, a name that embodies lots of cultural loans and linguistic transformations spanning more than 2.000 years of Mediterranean and global history!

An internet search for “bogue” leads to two, unrelated but strangely analogous finds.

On the one hand, there’s the American cornet player and comedian Merwyn Bogue, also known as Ish Kabibble.  He worked on stage and on the radio just before WWII, playing music, being a vocalist and adopting a comedian, goofy persona.  His talents and his business acumen were well known among his contemporaries but nowadays few are aware of him or appreciate his work. 

The more common result on this web search is the subject of this post, the fish called bogue, aka Boops boops.  It is an unremarkable fish, or so would search engine results suggest.  It is gray-silvery, with some fine, discrete yellow bands adorning its sides. It is smallish in size, abundant in numbers and, according to common opinion, not particularly tasty. Nothing like its highbrow cousins, most of the other sea breams.  Bogues belong in the same family of fishes, the Sparidae, but they inhabit the lowest echelons of fame and monetary value among the sea breams.

So, what is so special about this fish?  The same thing that was special about Merwyn Bogue.  Its importance goes back in time, and it was appreciated (and it still is) by those who have an eye for the real value of fish— the fishers and the connoisseurs of fish gastronomy.  The bogue and its hidden merits have lifted people’s spirits for millennia!

The bogue is a fish of the Mediterranean and the eastern coasts of the Atlantic, mostly north of the equator.  It’s a gregarious—meaning it lives in groups, or schools—and swims near the seabed or in mid-water. At night it ascends to the surface.  Nowadays these fish are caught in large quantities by seines and trawlers. The schools are spotted by sonar and the huge nets do all the work.  Not much skill is involved.  Up to a few decades ago, however, and for millennia before that, bogues were a real challenge to the fishers.  It is not so much that they are difficult to catch. As long as the fishers bail enough groundbait in the sea, or use the right kind of bait, they can return home with their fish baskets full of bogues. Themos Potamianos in his book “Through the Fisherman’s Viewing Glass” (Με το Γυαλί του Ψαρά ) describes the process vividly. The trick is to pinpoint the location of the bogue school in the waters and to know at what exact depth they are at any given moment.  If you drop your lines or your nets too high or too deep nothing much will happen.  That is why, in days past, the fishing of bogue was a group activity.  A skilled fisherman in a boat estimated the exact depth where the bogues swam, and others took advantage of this and harvested the school.  Skill and knowledge were the key.

Bogues were among the most commonly eaten fish along the coasts of the Aegean in the past and the 2^nd milennium  BC, the heart of the so-called Bronze Age, gives us a very interesting snapshot of bogue lore.  That was  a time  of important economic, political, and social developments in Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean. It is an era known for its luxurious architecture, for its elaborate ceremonial  and secular objects, now exhibited in museums, and for a complex economy structured around controling institutions such as the Palaces.  Yet, archaeological excavations also produce piles of small, seemingly  insignificant finds: fish bones.  Many smaller than 5 mm in length, they represent the catches of the Bronze Age fishers in the Aegean.  Bones of bogue (and those of their close relatives, the picarel: Spicara smaris, Spicara maena, Spicara flexuosa, Centracanthus cirrus) are plentiful in those samples.  Small as well as slightly larger specimens were apparently caught and eaten often.  They were in fact the basis of people’s fish diet.

In Greek the fish is called βῶπα, βοῦπα, γόπα, γῶπα, γοῦπα, μπόπα or by a number of other renditions of these two-syllable words.  The same is true for this fish’s name in Italian, Croatian and other languages.  Apparently, all these names had the same root. 

There are all sorts of stories about the etymology of the name.  Apparently, this was a topic suitable for dinner conversation, and especially fit for the inebriated literary exhibitionism of some Greek symposia in antiquity.  After the food had been consumed (often fish and seafood), and lots of watered-down wine had been drunk, it was time for music, dancing, games, and literary chatter.  A symposiast would ask, for example: “who has written about this special tasty bread we eat tonight?”  And the rest of the participants would start reciting excerpts of literary works that mentioned the topic. There is in fact a multi-volume poem by Athenaeus, a rhetorician and grammarian from Naukratis who lived at the end of the 2^nd and the beginning of the 3^rd century AD, which vividly portrays these sympotic discussions.  The poem is called “Wise Men at Table” and in it we find several references to the bogue and what ancient Greek authors had to say about it.

We read that according to several authors the fish took its name from the fact that it pocessed a voice (βοή= shout, cry), and for this reason it was a sacred fish to Hermes (Ath. 287 a). Others, believed that it got its name from the fact that its eyes are proportionally large, much like the eyes of a bull (βους=bull,  ὄμμα< ὄπ-μα =eye).  In ancient Greek literature we also find comments on its gregarious nature, and the fact that it is an excellent bait for an unknown to us fish called συνόδους, and for the common dentex.  It was considered a fish easy to digest and with laxative properties.

In recent times, the bogue is lumped with fish of lesser quality, and relatively few people like it for reasons other than its low price.  Those who know the fish well, however, and those who have access to very fresh bogues truly delight in its juicy flesh and heady aroma.  Crispy fried bogues served with boiled wild greens and plenty of olive oil and lemon juice constitute the quintessential summer dish.

Not many people cook bogue in more elaborate ways.   A few surviving traditional recipes from around the Aegean, however, show us that this was not always the case.  Bogue with rice, for example, is a recipe as elaborate as others that involve more prestigious fish. 

The bogue is the underdog of fishes: plentiful yet often ignored, delicious yet underappreciated, its value dropping along with the decrease of the knowledge and skill of modern fishermen.  This fish, which has fed people all over the Aegean and the Mediterranean since antiquity, deserves to be known and appreciated.  It deserves to be desired!

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