If your aspiration is to leave the Quinta Crespo market with fresh, good and cheap fishing, it would be good that this season you do not discard the help of the miraculous Nazareno de San Pablo beforehand.
In the preamble to Good Thursday and Good Friday, when the religious tradition that has become popular culture forces people to stay away from meat of all kinds, sinful and expensive, the refrigerators of the fishmongers in the popular Quinta Crespo market seemed to be stocked with species from the most recent melting of a glacier from another era.
But it’s not about climate change. Rather, they indicate an opportunistic and great emptying of the cellars full of merchandise that had no outlet in times of the greatest pandemic.
We say this, among other reasons, because of the dry skin and crooked tails of the smooth ones ($2) and the languid eyes of the carrachanas or pretty ones ($3.5) to which customers, without much green in their pockets, returned such a sad and melancholy look.
*Also read: Sundde set fish prices ahead of Easter
Behind the glass of many refrigerators, those skins that were once silver, the one from the kingfish ($7.5), the one from the curvina ($8) or the one from the lamparosas ($2.80) looked whitish, as if smeared with milk of magnesia . A good remedy, by the way, for beach vacationers sunburned in seasons of yesteryear. But the fish are not occasional bathers who like to catch the sun.
The purplish darkness of the horse mackerel wheels ($3) betrayed the remote times in which it fell into the net. The lebranche ($4) and the snorer ($3) looked somewhat better. I wish we could say the same for the always supportive cataco ($2.80) -thanks for the favors granted- and the cojinúa ($3.5).
As every fishmonger has its aristocracy, and that stands out in the prices, we saw the sea bass filet at $9, the dorado at $7, the tuna loin at $9, the white tuna flying at $11, the parguitos, not so red anymore but in an accelerated process towards a pale pink, at $7 and corvina at $8.
Pass all of the above. Now, the tremendous doubt with which we leave the noisy crespista facilities, is what does the kilo of dogfish ($ 7) do, that species of so much demand for mojito with rice and empanadas, but that does not happen from there, rubbing shoulders with the price of grouper, a refined species and raw material that unleashes the exotic imagination of any local or international chef?
Nothing, that thus the most demand for the accessible price makes it expensive the excess of mercantile use, reducing the options that previously helped the humble plebs. That’s when you, heading towards Baralt Avenue and with an empty sack, raise your eyes to the sky and exclaim: Help us, Nazareno de San Pablo!
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