Best Food Writing 2010 (21 page)

SARDINES!

By Jeff Koehler From
Tin House

Author of
Rice Pasta Couscous
and
La Paella
, writer/photographer Jeff Koehler discourses on food and travel from his adopted home base of Barcelona. This ruminative essay from the literary magazine
Tin House
traces how he ended up there, with some fishy detours.

F
ew things travel as well as canned sardines. The familiar flat tins end up on shop shelves in every dusty nook and far-flung cranny across the globe, as I discovered as a young, itinerate backpacker in some of Africa’s dustiest and Asia’s furthest-flung spots. During this period of discovery in tastes when food made as big an impact on me as the places and people, I feasted on sardines regularly. They tended to be strong in taste, mealy in texture, and soggy with the oil, tomato sauce, mustard, or seasoned vinegar in which they had been packed. But they were new and exotic to me, cheap, and readily available.

Many of these meals—made simply of moments spent drawing the headless and tailless fish from their packed clusters—remain unforgettable: on an empty, dilapidated cargo ship, traveling up the isolate west coast of Madagascar; in Kassala, Sudan, before joining Eritrean refugees on the week-long road to Asmara to vote for the country’s independence from Ethiopia; on a local bus from Phnom Penh to the Vietnam border, hurrying to reach Ho Chi Minh City in time for the Tet celebrations; in a remote northern tribal area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border one brisk early spring.

After four years on the road, I settled into the penurious existence of a London grad student and bought my sardine supply from a Kashmiri corner shop. I ate them for lunch in my cramped residence-hall room with fat purple olives, salty Bulgarian feta, and Iranian flatbread, while studying broken-spined copies of Lorca, Gorky, and Pinter. Sure, I ate them for their low cost, but also because they carried with them the familiar light of the African and Asian roads that, especially during those dusky winter London afternoons, I dearly missed.

But it wasn’t until I impetuously followed a woman from London and settled in Barcelona that I was initiated into the glories of fresh sardines.

Sardines have been popular since antiquity. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all enjoyed them, often preserved in salt. In the King James Bible, the fish that Jesus multiplied to feed the multitude are referred to as “little” (Matthew 15:34) and “small” (Mark 8:7, John 6:9), almost certainly sardines. Preserving sardines was the main industry in Mary Magdalene’s village of Magdala on the Sea of Galilee; the town’s Greek name, Tarichaeae, means “the place where fish are salted.” These days Yonah brand preserves kosher “Sea of Galilee” sardines by packing them in oval tins.

The practice of canning sardines began in Nantes, France, in 1834. By 1860, there was a lively import market for them in the United States. When the Franco-Prussian War (1871-1872) impeded the trade, a savvy New York importer named Julius Wolff went north to scout out a local source. In Eastport, Maine, on Passamaquoddy Bay, he opened the country’s first sardine factory, using the immature herring that swam off the state’s coast. The first American “sardines” were sealed in cans on February 2, 1876, and in a year, sixty thousand cans had been packed and sold. The boom spread quickly. Within five years, factories dotted the coasts of Maine and nearby Canada, and, in 1896, the first factory opened on the West Coast.

Monterey, 120 miles south of San Francisco, was the center of California’s industry. John Steinbeck set his novel Cannery Row among its Depression-era sardine canneries. The beginning of the book draws a lively portrait of the times:

In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. . . . Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row . . . to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired . . . men and women straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again—quiet and magical.

Monterey’s production peaked with 234,000 tons of processed sardines in 1944, the same year that Steinbeck wrote his novel. But, whether through over-fishing and exploitation or consecutive years of failed spawning, the industry collapsed as quickly as it rose, and the last Monterey cannery shuttered its doors in 1973. Today, sardines are fished in American waters almost exclusively for fishmeal, cat food, and bait for Japanese tuna or Maine lobster fisheries.

It’s no surprise, then, that while imported canned sardines are easy to buy in the United States, it’s almost impossible to find fresh ones. During a visit this summer, I found tips sprinkled throughout online chatrooms and heard rumors about one place in New Jersey, which imports them once a week from Portugal, another in Rhode Island, and a Korean place in the San Fernando Valley that sometimes carries them.

Such deep searching isn’t necessary around the Mediterranean. These slender, dense packets of nutrients, rich in calcium, protein, and omega-3 fatty acids, and—thanks to being far down on the food chain—low in mercury, are eaten with great gusto not just for their healthfulness but their sublime flavor. Under international trade laws, “sardine” covers almost two dozen species of fish (for U.S. products it exclusively means young herring), though the true sardine, from Portugal, Spain, France, Morocco, and Algeria, refers to the young pilchard (
Sardina pilchardus
) caught in Mediterranean or Atlantic waters. They have green backs, yellowish sides, silver bellies, and ruddy-brown meat. (Atlantic sardines tend to be larger, with smaller heads and bulkier bodies.) Though commercially fished all year round, they are most abundant in markets from July to November.

I spent much of the past two years traveling around the Mediterranean, researching a new cookbook, and feasted on sardines nearly everywhere: grilled sardine sandwiches heaped with raw onion, tomato, and chopped parsley in Istanbul; liberally dusted with cumin and fried in Cairo; char-grilled and dashed with lemon and salt in Morocco. In Sicily I sampled the island’s famous pasta con le sarde—bucatini with sardines, wild fennel, raisins, and pine nuts—at least half a dozen times, though I preferred sarde imbottite—sardines butterflied, stuffed with bread-crumbs and pine nuts, and baked. Sardines are equally beloved in Algeria. One cookbook I bought in Algiers this winter includes nine different ways of preparing them, from simply baked with bay leaves to prepared in a vinegar and oil marinade called escabeche.

Recipes for escabeche appear in two medieval Catalan cookbooks—the anonymous 1324 Libre de Sent Sovi and Ruperto de Nola’s 1477 Libre de Coch. Introduced into Spain during the Moorish rule of the region that began in the eighth century, escabeche has long been a popular preparation of everything from small birds to eggplant. De Nola, rightly, indicates that the marinade is best for fish. While any type of fish can be preserved escabechado, sardines—for their size, firm meat, and bold flavor—are the traditional choice. Quickly pan-fried, the sardines are layered into a rectangular clay cazuela and covered with a hot marinade of olive oil, wine vinegar, unpeeled cloves of garlic, sprigs of thyme, pímentón (smoky, sweet paprika), bay leaves, and peppercorns. It takes a day for the fish to sing with the infused flavors, and it can be kept and enjoyed for weeks.

This was one of the first dishes I tried to work out in my kitchen by repetitiously imitating versions I had eaten in smoke-stained, tile-walled bars. Reveling in having my own kitchen again, I tried to recreate certain tastes using skills that were more logical than sophisticated. I hadn’t yet developed a vocabulary to name the flavors I was trying to achieve, nor the spices I needed in order to do so. I was, I can see now, a dozen years later, teaching myself to cook by taste—by working backwards from taste—just as others learn the piano by ear. Some of these dishes were good (and they tended to get repeated), others passable. But it didn’t matter. I was cooking only for myself and the Catalan woman I had followed (and then married). I had time; there would be plenty of meals.

Sardinas en escabeche became part of my repertoire, and I still enjoy it in autumn when the hues and scents of the dish feel right for the cool, clear days. Eventually, I learned to prepare sardines in many different ways. At home we like them pan-grilled and eaten with plump grapes. Or grilled and crowning a slice of toasted country bread piled with strips of roasted red peppers, eggplant, and onions. Or batter-dipped and fried with slices of acidic apple. These days, my two girls love it when I bury a mess of sardines whole under a mound of coarse sea salt, and then bake the lot in a hot oven for 15 minutes. They enthusiastically take turns breaking open the salt crust with a wooden mallet while my wife and I scramble to dig out the succulent fish—moist and completely cooked in their own juices—before the girls crush them.

But, without a doubt, the most pleasurable way to eat fresh sardines is a la brasa, grilled outside in the open air over hot embers. The flavors are at their robust finest, the flesh sparkling and briny, shaded with smoky oils. Inside, that distinct smell of searing sardines is overpowering, even pungent (and immediately alerts every neighbor as to what’s on the stove), but outside, among green leaves and dusty loam, or on a sandy beach with sea breezes, it’s evocatively, stirringly aromatic.

Food in Catalonia is frequently celebrated simply for itself and a sardinada is a celebration of sardines. Abundant and inexpensive, sardines make a perfect centerpiece for large gatherings of friends, extended families, even village feasts. The peak of the sardinada season is de Virgen a Virgen (“from Virgin to Virgin”), between the feast days of Carmen—July 16th, when maritime parades and watery blessings of the seaman’s protectress marks summer’s start—and of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven—August 15th. This is the hottest period of the year, when meals are served especially late and preferably out-of-doors, and, more importantly, when sardines gorge themselves on the warm sea’s abundant plankton and fatten to their most flavorful.

My first summer in Barcelona, I joined a group for a sardinada along the coast south of the city. As cuttings of orange trees burned down to embers, the group assembled, bearing aperitivos, bottles of wine, desserts. Freshly caught sardines were brought out, kilos of them, at a calculation of eight or so per person (though some of our friends have been known to put away two or three times that many). When the embers were ready, the sardines were laid whole—neither head nor tail trimmed, nor innards removed—in a double-handled grill rack. Set just a few inches above the embers, the fish cooked for a couple of minutes on each side until the skin turned crispy gold and the eyes went white. We sprinkled the fish with a pinch of coarse sea salt and a drizzle of olive oil, then devoured them, picking them up with our fingers as fast as they were cool enough to handle. Sublime.

I’ve eaten plenty of grilled sardines since, and the distinctive, rustic flavor always brings me back to that first summer—plucking sardines from a hot grill, fingers blackened and greasy, surrounded by a growing pile of sucked-clean spines (and empty wine bottles). I may not have yet been able to understand much of the conversations swirling around me, but I already knew that I had arrived in the place where I would settle.

And if I want to take myself back further, back to my cramped room in London as an impressionable student, or, more potently, to some distant and dusty place as an eager, unsure wanderer, all I need to do is peel back the lid of a sardine tin and extract a single silvery fish from the packed cluster.

Sardines in Escabeche

Serves 4

1 pound fresh, whole medium sardines (about 16)
1½ cups virgin olive oil
Salt
Flour for dusting
½ cup white wine vinegar
6 garlic cloves, unpeeled with loose outer white paper re-
moved
3 sprigs thyme
1 teaspoon Spanish
pímentón dulce
(sweet paprika)
3 bay leaves
12 whole peppercorns

Gently scale the sardines with a knife. Remove the head and guts in the following manner: hold the sardine with one hand and with the other rock the head first upwards, breaking the neck, then downwards, and finally firmly pulling it toward you, drawing out the guts. Run a finger through the cavity to make sure it is clean. Rinse well with cool, running water and pat dry.