Hamsi tava

Hamsi tava is the Black Sea way with anchovies: small fresh hamsi, gutted but usually left whole with the head off, rolled in coarse cornmeal and fried in a shallow pan until the flour sets into a crust. In Trabzon, Rize and along the whole Turkish Black Sea coast it is the dish of the anchovy season, roughly November to February, when the fish are fattest and sold by the kilo from crates at the harbour, and a family will cook it several times a week. The cornmeal is what separates it from fried fish elsewhere in Turkey, where wheat flour is the norm; the region grows maize and uses it for bread, for mıhlama and for this. The anchovies are often fanned in a single layer in a round pan, tails to the centre, so that the whole thing can be flipped as one disc and served looking like a wheel.