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Lisbon from Home #4: Remember all your Tinned Fish?
I am pretty sure many of you have lots of Tinned Fish in you kitchen!
We do – and for no other reasons that the the colorful wrappings look good: I Just had to buy them. So I couldn’t help laughing at myself when I read Jeff Gordinier’s story in Esquire yesterday.
If you had suggested to me, at the beginning of the year, that there would be serious sales potential in a weird little book full of recipes involving canned tuna, herring, and mackerel, I would have laughed and directed you to the pile of forgotten cookbooks in my basement. But now it’s the middle of March, and a lot of us are stuck in our homes.
We can, as of this moment, safely venture out and buy fresh seafood, sure, but some primitive impulse to hoard means that many of us appear to have quarantine-ready stockpiles of tinned fish in our pantries... just in case. In that sense, we’re all living like freelance food writers. Sardines on toast = a common midday repast for those of us in the typing-words-at-home trade.
Such is my fondness for conservas (as they’re known on the Iberian Peninsula) that when my wife and I traveled to Portugal in 2017, I spent hours in tinned-fish shops gazing in wonder at the beautifully packaged wares. We even have a poster of Portuguese sardines hanging in our kitchen.
We can, as of this moment, safely venture out and buy fresh seafood, sure, but some primitive impulse to hoard means that many of us appear to have quarantine-ready stockpiles of tinned fish in our pantries... just in case. In that sense, we’re all living like freelance food writers. Sardines on toast = a common midday repast for those of us in the typing-words-at-home trade.
Such is my fondness for conservas (as they’re known on the Iberian Peninsula) that when my wife and I traveled to Portugal in 2017, I spent hours in tinned-fish shops gazing in wonder at the beautifully packaged wares. We even have a poster of Portuguese sardines hanging in our kitchen.
We actually like Tinned Food - but eat it fare too rarely.
All the ways I have prepared these tinned delicacies during my childhood and youth popped up in my memory while reading Esquire.
The sardines served in an opened can served with two slices of rye bread, a quarter of lemon and “pimped” up with a bouquet of Parsley I had for lunch in the 70s at Copenhagen many ”værtshuse’. The sandwiches made from cans of sardines or salmons, mayonnaise and two loaves of bread we lived from during countless rock festivals, the deep fried breaded moules we made for snacks when I was child. And of course the tuna I used for one of my first haut de cuisine dishes: Salade Nicoise…
Today we mainly used the tuna for one of Italian favorites: Vitello Tonnato and sardines on toasted bread with a good olive oil.
Tinned Fish is probably the best distributed product from Portugal – you get it in supermarkets and grocery stores all over the world! And most people we know have cans hidden away in cupboards, drawers, fridges and other places they have for storing food items … just in case somethings happen.
Things happen NOW – this Cowid-19 isolation is the reason why you bought them. You just didn’t know.
So now that you can’t be here in Lissabon why not use the situation to get a taste of Portugal at home… remember its only until things get back to normal and people start traveling again.
See you when Covid is history,
Thomas
Canned Sardines is a French invention. Here is how it ended up in Portugal.
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