Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sardines, to Serve
Sardines, to Serve
When the fish are to be served, open the box with a tin-can opener, lift out as many sardines as are needed, wipe them lightly, and arrange neatly on a small dish. Garnish with chopped parsley and capers, and pour a little fresh salad-oil over them. On no account use the oil which is in the box. Send bread and butter to table with them.
An assembly job rather than a cooked dish, but the instructions carry a few assumptions worth unpacking.
- The one instruction that mattersDiscard the packing oil and dress with fresh oil. The book does not say why, but tinning oils of the period were variable in quality -- cottonseed and low-grade olive oil were both used, and could taste stale or fishy by the time the tin was opened. Today's brands are packed in decent olive oil, sunflower oil or spring water, and the oil from a good tin is often worth keeping. Taste it before you decide.
- Salad-oilIn this period the term generally means olive oil of table quality rather than the cheaper oils sold for other purposes. Use a fruity extra-virgin oil and only a spoonful or two.
- Wiping the fishThe point is to remove surplus oil without breaking the fish. Lay them on kitchen paper and blot rather than rubbing; tinned sardines break easily.
- Opening the tinThe tin-can opener is now a ring-pull on most brands. Where a key is fitted, roll the lid fully off rather than half-opening it, or the sardines will tear coming out.
- Bones and skinSmall sardines are eaten whole, bones and all, and the soft bones are a useful source of calcium. Larger tinned sardines sometimes have a heavy backbone that lifts out in one piece with the point of a knife.
- Garnish and quantityChopped parsley and capers still work; a squeeze of lemon and a grind of pepper would not be out of place. A typical tin of about 100-125 g will do for two as a savoury or light first course, more if it is the whole of a lunch.
- ServingThe recipe sends plain bread and butter to table with the fish, and that is still the best accompaniment; toast is also good, but butter the toast and let it cool a little so the fish does not slide.
Sardines in oil were one of the earliest canned foods to reach an ordinary household table, the Nantes canners of the French Atlantic coast having established the trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, and by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled the tin was a fixture of the British larder. That may well be why an entry like this exists: one can imagine the book's readers wanting instruction not in cooking but in presentation, since the tinned sardine arguably occupied an awkward social position as a cheap staple that was nonetheless expected to appear at the supper table or as a savoury at the close of dinner. The insistence on throwing away the packing oil is a real clue to the period, when tinning standards varied widely and the medium may often have been the worst thing in the box. Sardines also belonged to the late-Victorian category of "relishes" or high-tea dishes, served with bread and butter alongside potted meats and anchovy paste, food that required no cook at all and could presumably be put together by a housemaid or by the family itself.