Galicia and the Rías: Why the World's Best Shellfish Tins Come from One Corner of Spain
Look at a map of Spain's northwest corner and the coastline looks torn. Long fingers of sea reach inland between green hills, some of them twenty miles deep, and each one is a ría, a river valley drowned by the Atlantic when the last ice age ended. The Rías Baixas, the lower ones south of Cape Finisterre, are calm, shallow, fed by rivers full of nutrients and warmed by a current that keeps them mild year round. Shellfish grow in them the way grass grows in Ireland. Nowhere else in Europe produces as many mussels, cockles, clams and razor clams from as small an area, and a century of Galician canners have made them into the finest shellfish tins in the world.
This is a guide to the place behind the tins on our shelf: the water, the rafts, the women on the tidal flats, the canneries, and the way Galicians eat what they catch. Our producer guides to Conservas de Cambados and Ramón Peña go inside two of the houses; this is the coast they stand on.
The rías
A ría is not an estuary in the usual sense. The rivers that feed the Galician rías are small; what fills them is the sea, pushed in and out twice a day by some of the largest tides in Spain, mixing ocean water with river nutrients across shallow, sheltered flats. The mixing is what matters. Phytoplankton blooms in that water, and shellfish, which are filter feeders, grow fast and fat on it. The Ría de Arousa, the largest, is ringed by the towns whose names appear on tins: Cambados, Vilanova, O Grove, Illa de Arousa. The Ría de Vigo, to the south, has the great port city and its canneries. The rías are also wine country; the Albariño vineyards of Rías Baixas run down to the water, and the local pairing of a cold glass with a plate of shellfish is not a marketing idea but the ordinary lunch.
The rafts
Out on the water sit the bateas: rectangular wooden rafts, hundreds of them in the Ría de Arousa alone, each with hundreds of ropes hanging thirty feet into the water. Mussel spat, the larval mussels, settle on the ropes and grow there for a year or more, feeding on the plankton, never touching the bottom, never gathering grit. The system was developed in the mid twentieth century and it made Galicia the largest mussel producer in Europe; it is also why a Galician tinned mussel is plump, clean and sweet in a way a wild rock mussel rarely is. The rafts are family businesses, and the mussel grower and the canner are often neighbors.
The women on the flats
Cockles and clams grow in the sand, and they are harvested by hand. At low tide, the mariscadoras, shellfish gatherers who are almost entirely women, walk out onto the flats with short rakes and baskets and work the sand in lines, sorting by size, returning the small ones. The trade is licensed, the beds are managed by the local fishing guilds, and the quotas are enforced, which is why the beds have survived a century of demand. Razor clams are taken differently, by divers or by hand with a spike, one at a time, from their vertical burrows; our razor clam guide explains the species behind the names navaja and longueirón. What arrives at the cannery has been touched by a person at every step.
The canneries
Galicia's canning tradition is as old as Portugal's and more focused on shellfish. The great houses grew up around the rías in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the survivors are still mostly family firms: Cambados, Ramón Peña, and a handful of others whose tins are on the shelf when in stock. The method is the one we walk through in a day at the cannery, adapted to shellfish: the mussels, cockles and clams are cleaned, cooked briefly, and packed by hand into tins with brine or, for mussels, an escabeche of vinegar, olive oil, paprika and bay. Galician tins are graded by count: the number of pieces in the tin, printed on the label, where fewer means larger and larger means dearer. A tin of eight to ten razor clams or twenty cockles from a good house is among the most expensive tinned foods in the world, and among the best.
How Galicians eat it
Seriously, and simply. A tin of cockles is opened and eaten with a fork and a squeeze of lemon, or with a few drops of a sharp vinegar sauce, over bread or on a potato chip, with a glass of Albariño or a cold beer, in the hour before lunch that the rest of Spain calls the vermut hour. Mussels in escabeche are a tapa in their own right. Razor clams are grilled fresh in summer and eaten from the tin the rest of the year. The tins are not a substitute for fresh; they are a separate, respected category, and a Galician will argue about canneries the way a Burgundian argues about vineyards. The one thing they do not do is cook the good tins. The shellfish has been cooked once already, properly, and the tin is the dish.
The rest of the table
Galician food beyond the tin is rustic and excellent: pulpo á feira, octopus boiled and dressed with olive oil and paprika on a wooden plate; empanada, the flat savory pie filled with tuna, sardines or pork; caldo galego, a soup of greens, potatoes and beans; the tetilla and San Simón cheeses; the almond tarta de Santiago at the end. Pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago have eaten this food for a thousand years on the way to the cathedral, and much of it is pantry food: paprika, olive oil, beans, tins. Our bean guide and spice guide supply the paprika and the beans.
Bringing the ría home
A Galician tin, a lemon, a good loaf and something cold and bitter is the whole idea. Build a tasting around the shellfish tins from light to rich. Simmer a tin of clams into fregola. Keep a tin of cockles in the pantry for the evening that needs rescuing. The Galician shellfish tins on our tinned fish shelf are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. The women on the flats and the men on the rafts did the hard part.
