How I discovered the joys of tinned fish
Until I was in my twenties, I thought tuna was a sort of grey, flaky mulch that tasted of brine and disappointment. I had no concept of what an actual tuna might look like: I’d only ever seen them in the form of a hockey-puck sized cylinder. They might have fished them from the inky depths pre tinned for all I knew.
This was back in 1980s suburban England, a time that taste didn’t forget – it had simply never been introduced. Decades before the gastronomic revolution that saw London, and now much of the rest of the UK, draw level and even overtake our continental neighbours when it comes to culinary prowess, dinnertime was a feast of microwavable things in various shades of beige. Vegetables were boiled to within moments of disintegration, often complimented by food stuffs that slipped inelegantly from tin cans.
My mother had – and still has – cupboards filled with such tinned things: fruits, vegetables, meats (banished when she became pescatarian, a word that literally didn’t exist until the late 1980s), soups and, of course, tuna. So when I left home and learned to cook, I swore off tinned food. Nary a can of pineapple chunks or a tin of chopped tomatoes lurked in my kitchen. Until recently, when I was reintroduced to the joys of tinned fish.
It started, as so many things in the food world do, in Copenhagen. Not at the gastronomic palaces of Geranium or Alchemist or the dozen other Michelin starred restaurants in the city but in the contemporary art gallery where, after an afternoon poking around the collections, I ended up in the cafe. Here they were offering visitors snacks of tinned sardines on toasted sourdough. You pointed to your tin of choice – sardines in brine, sardines in oil, sardines in tomato – and they flopped it out onto your toast. And it was delicious! Why did nobody tell me about this? How long has this been going on?
Tinned fish is now my go-to snack, the king of the cupboard. It honestly feels a bit like cheating
Then, on a recent trip to Portugal, I wandered past an entire shop dedicated to tinned fish – shelves stacked to the rafters with salty anchovies and flaked salmon and sardine roe and mackerel, each one packaged in bright, artisanal-looking cans.
So when I returned home I did a little research and signed up for a tinned fish subscription – because I am a Millennial and everything I buy must come in the form of a subscription – with a company called The Tinned Fish Market. It is what you might term ‘reassuringly expensive’, with the ‘classic’ tier coming in at £20 a month for three tins.
But it really is a treat when those tins arrive on the doorstep. I’ve had fat little Spanish mussels in tangy escabeche; Faroe Island salmon in sea buckthorn and verbena; Cantabrian anchovies so rich and salty it’s impossible not to finish the whole tin in one go; Papa Anzóis sardines that are dehydrated rather than steamed before canning, making them impossibly soft and juicy. And the tuna! Today I opened a tin of white tuna belly preserved in sheep’s butter: slivers of gorgeous, fatty, pale pink meat that’s a million miles from the work of Mr John West.
Tinned fish is now my go-to snack, the king of the cupboard. It honestly feels a bit like cheating. In fact, forget you read this at all, I don’t want everybody finding out.
• Steve is the editor of City AM The Magazine. For info on The Tinned Fish Market go to the website here