2 4 
cured pilchards in this exhibition with those in the Spanish 
division,* 
Unlike the mackerel, the pilchard is not sought for in its 
fresh state out of Cornwall and West Devon. Our 
fishermen have tried many markets with it, but without 
success. And this is the more remarkable seeing that the 
fish is cheap, nutritious, and of exceedingly good flavour. 
When tourists first found out West Cornwall, they very 
soon found out pilchards, and more, they turned a little bit 
of “chaff” against us west countrymen into a reality, at 
their own expense. It used to be said of us that we ate 
“ cream with our pilchards,” which of course we never did. 
But when the tourist came down, he took it for granted 
that he could eat clotted cream with everything, and he 
insisted on having “ cream with his pilchard,” and he is said 
to have got it, and to have found it so good a mixture that 
now no large hotel gives broiled pilchard for breakfast 
without it.f 
But we have other ways k of cooking them besides broiling. 
We fry them and eat them with a sauce made of finely 
chopped onions, salt, cold water, and nothing else; it is 
a very nasty sauce. And we eat them without any knives 
or forks, with our fingers. I do not say that all of us do 
this, but I have seen it done, and less than one hundred 
years ago the practice was universal amongst the bulk of 
our people. 
I hope to cure this want of a fresh pilchard market soon 
* There are two open barrels of the fish exhibited one at each end 
of the westernmost case in the Spanish Court. One is labelled 
“pressed sardines,” and the other “salted sardines,” but they are 
both of them pilchards, more cleanly cured than is our wont. 
t I can speak to the excellency of clotted cream as a t sauce with 
broiled pilchard from personal experience. 
