Wild Geese: Taste test delivers for Catalan smokehouse

“I’ve always had an affinity for the place and, in Spain, as in Ireland, family is what matters. If it wasn’t for my family I’d never have got this business going.”

The place in question was Barcelona but Margot Conway has now shifted 60km north to the inaccessible mountain village of Sant Iscle de Vallalta. From the balcony, you can usually see the distant sparkle of the Mediterranean but today the weather is more Connemara than Costa Brava and the hills are shrouded in fog.

Few have heard of Sant Iscle but Conway and Fumont, the company she has built up, have put it on the map as word spreads about the delicious smoked trout, caviar, quail and salt that she produces at her smokery. In May, Conway will be among a group of local artisan food producers at the Real Food Festival in London, under the aegis of La Boqueria, Barcelona's famous food market.

Conway was born near Niagara Falls after her Ballyshannon-born father and English mother emigrated to Canada, and then the US, in the early 1960s. The family then moved to Fort Lauderdale in Florida before, one by one, drifting back across the pond – her parents back to Ballyshannon, and Conway and her sister Gayna to England. Conway moved to Spain in 2000 with her partner Maggie, whose people hail from Dublin and New Ross.

Conway was a keen amateur cook. Before she went professional, she worked as “an engineer project manager, welder, fabricator, mechanic and builder”. It was when she was working on restoring an old mill in Penedès, the wine-growing area south of Barcelona, that she got her first whiff of vine smoke.

"They were burning the old vine stocks and the smoke smelled wonderful," she says. Shortly afterwards, she was invited to a calçotada , a Catalan tradition where calçots (large spring onions) are cooked on a vine wood brazier.

From that moment she was hooked on the idea of smoking fish and other products. “My dream is to take old vines and smoke a product that is the perfect pairing for the wine those vines produced,” she says.

She soon discovered that there were few smoked foods in Spain, where the tradition is to preserve meat and fish with salt. She researched smoking techniques and had a small smoker built by Scottish smoking enthusiast Kate Walker.

Conway uses a cold smoking process, in which products are cured by smoke and not by heat.

Soon after the smoker was shipped to Spain in 2005, the business was put on hold when Conway went back to Leicester for a year to nurse her sister Gayna who was dying of leukaemia. When she returned, she and Maggie bought the house in Sant Iscle.

The first challenge was to introduce smoked products to Spanish palates. She started by smoking tuna and swordfish.

“I have spent the past eight years experimenting with new products and getting them out there. Usually, the only way I can get through the door is to do tastings. I have given away so much product, or sold it to friends, trying to get the word out there – I’ve been an evangelist for smoking.”

The breakthrough came when Jordi Artal, chef at the Michelin-starred Cinc Sentits restaurant in Barcelona, was persuaded to try her products. He loved them, and they also discovered they both had family in St Catharines, Ontario, the town in Canada where Jordi grew up after his Catalan family emigrated there.

"Jordi has helped me so much to develop my palate and my craft," she says.

Bureaucracy
Spain is notorious for its bureaucracy and the business climate is hostile to bureaucracy.

“We got to the point with our artisan production that I had the confidence to take it to the next level, and begged and pleaded for my family members to invest money in the business. It took four years to find a place here in the village. The owners are a wealthy family, who are very keen for me to develop the business. They’ve given me a huge amount of support, as has the local mayoress, but the whole project is bogged down in bureaucracy.”

In spite of the obstacles, Conway is optimistic. “What’s really important is I’ve begun to collaborate with other artisan producers,” she says. “This is something that’s come out of the economic crisis here. Chefs and producers are beginning to collaborate because you just can’t do it on your own. I think the future looks bright for Fumont because I’m not alone any more.”

And to add icing to the cake, a few weeks ago, Conway’s parents upped sticks in Ballyshannon and moved to a village down the road from Sant Iscle to help out with what is fast becoming a family business.