Earlier this year, I started a new job and a colleague gave me some tins as a welcome gift, which was very thoughtful and all the better because they were great tins. One, though, stayed in the pantry until recently because I wasn’t sure what to do with it, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it because, while not inherently horrifying, it was adjacent to one of the horrors of my youth.

I’m speaking, of course, of herring.

The United States in the 1980s, as I often remind my children in an attempt to get them not to take things for granted, was a foreign country. My family moved around a lot, so I lived everywhere from New York to bucolic small towns to the woods, and everywhere supermarkets smelled like stale blood and were filled with things you have to go out of your way to find today, like barrels of pig feet and stacks of tripe. These are the places in which I first encountered and, for reasons I think even enthusiasts will understand, became determined never to consume jars of pickled herring floating in cream sauce. (Tripe I eventually came around on.)

Canned herring is nothing at all like jarred pickled herring, and literally not different at all from the canned sardines I eat all the time. (As this newsletter occasionally points out, in the context of eating fish out of cans, there’s not really such a thing as a sardine; it’s just a marketing term suggesting that it’s a small, oily fish in the Clupeoidei suborder. They’re all very nutritious, at least as far as I know.) Despite knowing this I always passed it over, until I saw a tin of Wildfish smoked herring at Cleo Bagels on Baltimore Avenue. Wildfish is fantastic—I like their smoked octopus and salmon a lot—and knowing that I had the tin of Bar Harbor kippers my colleague had given to me at home to compare it to, I decided to give things a go.

When I got home, I noticed that according to the packaging, I had purchased “smoked” herring; whether this is a matter for The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks or an admission that it wasn’t actually smoked and was instead infused with artificial smoke flavor is unclear to me, but it certainly tastes like it was smoked and the ingredient list features “all-natural wood smoke,” so it probably doesn’t matter. It was great! I mashed it up with an avocado and had it on a sesame bagel and it was the furthest thing possible from what I presume pickled herring in cream sauce to be like, just a smoky umami bomb. What it wasn’t, at least in this application, and likely for reasons laid out above, was particularly distinct from a high-quality can of smoked sardines—maybe the fish was slightly firmer, but I’m probably reaching there.

The Bar Harbor, when I got to it the next day, in fact was distinct. When opened, the can revealed six large, smoky fillets steeping in cracked pepper and their juices, and they resembled nothing so much as pastrami. Here I’ll note that since seeing a poster from an animal-rights group on a lamppost in London this summer—I was accompanied at the time by a doe-eyed vegetarian child—I haven’t been eating meat from land animals. (I’ve been going on such jags for years at a time my whole life and this one may well stick.) I’ll also note that since dark suspicions proved well-founded and a break from dairy in fact cleared up a dermatological problem, I haven’t been eating that, either. Obviously, then, I immediately focused on the possibility of something akin to a bacon, egg, and cheese on a bagel—in previous times, a personal favorite—and found that this herring was absolutely perfect for the application, with avocado standing in for the cheese and the salty smokiness of the fish giving me everything I want out of bacon and nothing that I don’t. My only objection was that I could only finish half.

Since this revelation, smoked herring has more or less displaced sardines in my rotation, something that could be a passing phase or could be the beginnings of a lifestyle change. (I suspect it will stay this way until the weather warms up, and that sardines, which for reasons I find it difficult to articulate feel like a bit more like spring and summer than they do winter, will come back into focus.) It’s every bit as good on toast if I just want a light meal, but also offers other possibilities. For instance, the Bar Harbor fillets can be picked up like strips of bacon and dunked into the yolk of a fried egg—something I suppose you could do with a sardine, but that for reasons of texture as well as flavor and shape just wouldn’t work as well. (I’ll note that there are two varieties of Bar Harbor, the one mentioned here and All Natural Smoked Wild Kippers. The latter, at least in my experience, is excellent but not quite as smoky and comes in larger fillets that don’t make as good an approximation of a pile of strips of bacon.) I’ve also found that King Oscar’s cheap and ubiquitous kipper snacks are, for the purpose, an essentially perfect tin. While they have the same mild shape-related shortcoming that Bar Harbor’s All Natural Smoked Wild Kippers do relative to the Wild Herring Fillets Seasoned with Cracked Pepper, they’re every bit as good and, crucially, come in a somewhat smaller size so that you don’t have to commit to feeling as if you’re eating an entire school of herring when you open a tin. (Both brands also catch their fish in the wild and are certified as sustainable by the MSC, for what you find that worth.)

This has been an exciting voyage of discovery, especially as I have yet to have any bad kippers. (If you’re wondering, while I’m not posing as an expert here, kippering is a method of cooking, so that kippers are just a type of herring that has been kippered. Why they’re called snacks I have no idea.) The worst I’ve had are from widely-available supermarket brand Brunswick, and they were fine, just a bit bland on toast with mustard and sauerkraut. Will the joys of herring lead me to try some that come in a jar swimming in sour cream? Almost assuredly not, though I’ll try to keep an open mind.

This week, while traveling for work, I went out for dinner with two people I didn’t know well and ordered salmon, which in the way of things naturally led to me explaining the existence of this newsletter and one of my dining companions, a Norwegian, excitedly asking if I’d ever had a blur of consonants—or, in English, mackerel in tomato sauce. I’d had mackerel in tomato sauce, I said—I did not mention that I’ve eaten it with peanut butter—but not the specific kind he was talking about, and he went on to explain how he’d grown up eating the stuff and delighted in watching repulsed Americans spit it out. This is how I ended up shoving a tin and a box full of six small plastic tubs of Stabbur-Makrell brand mackerel in tomato sauce that his mother had sent him as part of an annual care package full of Norwegian foodstuffs into my travel bag. There wasn’t really room for them, but there’s always a way.

As the Norwegian explained to me, this is the kind of traditional food that Norwegians joke about expecting to die with their grandparents, something associated with childhood that you eat for lunch and as a snack. (Norway, a country where tins of liver paste feature smiling, cherubic children, ranks among the world leaders in life expectancy and, more nebulously, quality of life. I don’t know which way the causality arrow runs, but probably you’ll get better results from oily fish and liver as convenience foods shoved at children than from Uncrustables.) He raised two key points. The first was that tin and tub are distinct: The former, which he prefers, features a fillet of mackerel in sauce, while in the latter, the mackerel is finely minced with an equivalent amount of tomato sauce. The second was a strong recommendation to have it on rye bread with butter—not, he emphasized, mayonnaise.

When I returned home, I put all the fish, in its various varieties, in the refrigerator. The next day, I bought a lovely loaf of sourdough rye from Lost Bread Co. and went to work, toasting and buttering some bread—I’ll have it on or, as many Norwegians apparently recommend, topped by mayo around the same time I cut my left leg off with my pocketknife—and putting some sauerkraut in a bowl and then getting down to business.

The tin was pungent and “fishy.” (I mean this as a euphemism for the fact that when I first opened it its funk carried, for just a moment and before it dissipated, a hint of a resemblance to cat food, something I don’t want to emphasize because I after all went on to eat and enjoy it and don’t want to dissuade you or for that matter make you think I’m weird.) (Despite the efforts of the vast marketing apparatus of the tinned seafood-industrial complex to associate its product with the complexity and sophistication of specialty makers whose products are in no way “fishy,” many worthwhile tins are, and that’s worth bearing in mind if you’re ever trying out mackerel that isn’t being presented as avant-garde spectacle. Anyway.) The tomato sauce was thick and the fish resistant and mildly stiff as I mashed and spread two-thirds of the contents of the tin on the toast, then salted and peppered them. The results showed me why Norwegians apparently call this “plane crash.”

At the moment of truth, I decided that to hesitate would be to lose and tore in. It was … good! It was good, my main grievance being that it was fairly bland. The sauce—almost closer to paste—was thick and sweet, the mackerel richer and more tender than its dry texture under the fork would suggest. This was hearty and sat light, and with a hardboiled egg and an apple (and some hot sauce) it would be great for a day when I was working outside. I would have this again; if I saw Stabbur-Makrell in the store for less than $3.50 or so I would buy some; I have a difficult time imagining craving this so much that I would want to spread it as a condiment. And yet I was confronted by the reality that I owned small plastic containers about the size of a single-serve tub of cream cheese like the ones they give out here in Philadelphia, a city where a disturbing number of food purveyors think that a customer who orders a toasted bagel with cream cheese wants to themselves wrestle a small amount of cream cheese out of a tub with a flimsy plastic knife and then spread it.

The next day, armed with some plainer rye bread from Ric’s Bread—the sourdough rye, while amazing, was a bit dense for the purpose—and the leftovers from the tin, I recreated the same lunch I’d made the day before. The minced mackerel with sauce from the tub went on, as you’d expect, smooth and easy, and, presumably in part because of the increased ratio of sauce to fish, had no notable fishy funkiness.

I didn’t notice any real difference between the two slices and what you’d expect from the differences in texture and the amount of sauce in each. (I did firmly conclude that in either preparation, this needs some herbs and aromatics in addition to some spice.) I preferred the tin but it occurred to me that the less fishy variety, in a quantity this small, could be useful in acculturating a small child to mackerel in tomato sauce—not a bad thing if you intend to raise either a child or a nation that prefers oily fish, with its protein and vitamins and good fats, to Uncrustables. On its own terms, though, the amount of protein and vitamins and good fats in a 22-gram tub is fairly negligible, implying a existence of a use case involving spreading the almost unseasoned mixture of mackerel and tomato paste mainly for the flavor and the umami, like Marmite. For all the power of childhood associations, it’s one I find it difficult to imagine having developed. This successful experiment, though, has me wanting to try some Northern European tins, now that it’s getting to that time of year when it’s dark and gloomy and boiled potatoes, thick, heavy bread, and small fish in mysterious sauces start to seem more appealing.

Housekeeping

—While I still haven’t eaten that krill, I eventually will, and will report back with results.

—This newsletter has been even more sporadic than usual this year due to (uniformly positive) professional happenings and obligations; I think I’ll be sending it out somewhat more often going forward, though, so if you have any requests please let me know.

For years I’ve seen cans and jars of Ortiz-brand fish at good grocery stores, and for years I’ve avoided them. I have no issue with tuna, a fine fish if one I don’t eat often, but for whatever reason, small fillets of it jarred in oil have never appealed to me, and association with them—an association Ortiz has carried for me because of the shelving practices of a green grocer on 53rd St. in Chicago—has made me suspicious.

This changed a few weeks ago when I was in DiBruno Bros., the Philadelphia grocer, and a display of Ortiz sardines caught my eye. Some may say that can design isn’t a good reason to try a can of fish, but I disagree; while there are lots of excellent cans that have plain or unattractive designs, generally, nice designs go with nice fish, and I can in fact only think of one tin I bought due to the design that turned out to be bad, something I confirmed by trying it a second time and again finding mushy fish. While for years I’d rejected Ortiz, on this occasion the vivid primary colors overcame me, and I reasoned that if the sardines were bad they probably wouldn’t be so ubiquitous. We have to be open to change.

Of course the sardines were superb—plump, firm, and meaty, and packed in high-quality olive oil. The tin claims that these are prepared according to an original recipe from 1824; I see no reason to doubt that and would like to think it’s true, especially since the design of the can makes it look like something you’d see in the corner of an artist’s studio, preserved as it was 100 years ago. For the last few weeks these have been the only fish I’ve been eating, in part because they’re so good and in part because they’re one of the four or so brands Cleo, the new bagel shop in my neighborhood, carries, making them the best sardines you can get within a short walk from my house.

While these are fine any way you want to have them, I’ve been having them with caramelized onion jam.

This is a tough time of year for me, because while I don’t make a religion of it, I do try and eat local, seasonal foods, partly because they’re better and partly because I like having a tangible connection to the natural cycles of death and rebirth around me. This is great when the peaches and berries are bursting and somewhat less so when, for the third month in a row, the choice is between beets, turnips, and rutabaga, along with ever less impressive apples. One solution, as it has been forever, is preserved food—pickles and ferments and plain old things canned out of the garden to add zing and zip to greens and piles of second-rate starch.

As the skeptical looks a local onion enthusiast has given me when presented with caramelized onion jam have reminded me, the appeal of jelly made out of onions is perhaps not as obvious and intuitive to everyone as it is to me. I get mine at the farmer’s market from the same people I get my smoked garlic from, and it’s a real burst of flavor that can jazz anything up, smoky but bright with thyme and rosemary but also almost (though not quite) cloyingly sweet. A dollop on a whole sardine on a toast or swirled in pasta with sardines cooked with bread crumbs would go great, but I’ve been layering them on bagels and then lightly warming in the toaster oven. It doesn’t quite bring summer into the house, but does bring a bit of early fall, which I’ll take when staring at rutabaga and thinking about how the longest, deadest month of winter is yet to come.

Housekeeping

—The purpose of this newsletter is strictly to discuss tinned fish. At my day job, though, I’ve recently been covering the Vince McMahon sex-trafficking scandal, and I discussed it at length with my friend Tom Scocca for his newsletter, Indignity, which is certainly worth subscribing to; you can read that discussion here.

—Readers responded to the last issue’s call for tips on what to do with a tin of krill with many excellent suggestions. I still haven’t gotten over my fear of beady eyes and crunchy chitin, but I will sooner or later, and will try one or more reader ideas, many of which revolve around utilizing the krill to make thin, Korean-style pancakes. One thing I like about canned fish is that there’s absolutely no rush.

The other day I went to my barber, who does not accept tips that tax authorities can trace, without going to an ATM beforehand. This left me, after getting a haircut, in the mildly irritating position of having to find a store nearby where I could get some cash and that would have something I’d want to break a twenty for. Happily, my barber’s shop is in the dense and rich area near Rittenhouse Square, which is how I found myself in a bodega looking at, and knowing I would have to purchase (for $8.37), a can of krill meat.

Most of what I know about krill has to do with legendary 1988 documents purportedly written by one “O.H. Krill.” Depending on who you believe, these were either a) a hoax John Lear (of the Learjet family) and legendary crank Bill Cooper, whose work directly inspired much of the X-Files mythology and broad public beliefs about aliens and the secret government, cooked up to troll a message board in the years before Cooper was killed in a standoff with Arizona police attempting to arrest him on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, or b) an authentic “situation report on our acquisition of advanced technology and interaction with alien cultures.” (The “our” here nominally refers to humanity broadly but more specifically refers to a sinister cabal busy maintaining a moon base, experimenting on alien cadavers, mutilating cattle, etc.) The rest is basic and possibly inaccurate received knowledge about how some whales filter tons of krill—tiny, shrimp-like creatures—out of water every day using specialized, tooth-like hairs that grow from the roof of their mouth and were somehow the basis of the Victorian economy when repurposed as backscratchers, horsewhips, corset stays, and so on. None of this has left me with many ideas of how to eat krill.

The website of the company that produces this can (it claims to be “the exclusive seller of krill meat in the US”) wasn’t, meaning no offense, much help—my culinary horizons are limited, and I’m simply not making Krill and Poblano Corn Chowder, Krill Pork Dumplings, Krill Stuffed Clams, or a Krill Cheese Melt, no doubt much to my detriment. The website of a company that claims to be “the exclusive importer of canned krill meat to the United States” also wasn’t much help—I am, again, simply not making a Keto Krill Canned Meat Stir-Fry. My main takeaway from these sites is that the krill in my pantry was caught in the Antarctic Ocean by a Ukranian vessel.

The most helpful guide to krill I’ve come across is from Buying Seafood, a website that reviews seafood.

“The intense aroma of shrimp fills the air when you peel back the lid,” the review states. “The actual krill is minced, and water is added, which I drained and gave to my cat. You can discern parts of the animals and the little black eyes. I tried a little out of the tin and it was very ‘shrimpy’ but since they are minced, didn’t have the right texture. All the little hard bits of chitin remined me of eating canned minced crabmeat. Not exactly a great first impression.” This is accompanied by a photograph of the can featuring easily-discerned black eyes, which are nothing to be concerned about, according to the company that produces this can. The first question on its FAQ page is “What are the little black speckles in my can?” “No need to be concerned here!” the answer reads. “Your meat is not dirty, and you did not get a defected can. Our Antarctic Krill meat contains the most nutritious parts of the krill, which happen to include their eyes. The little black speckles you see in the can are the eyeballs of the krill, which consist of a high abundance of nutrients. They are 100% safe to consume and only bring more of those healing benefits that we love from our Antarctic Krill meat.”

There is a lot of stuff on the krill providers’ websites about antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids and protein (one can of krill meat has 15 grams of protein and 67 calories, which is an impressive ratio), and I’m completely willing to believe that this is an exceptionally healthy food, but I eat a varied diet and don’t need krill eyeballs to stave off organ failure, especially at $8.37 per serving. What I’m after here is flavor or texture, and on that score, the Buying Seafood reviewer offers little reason for hope. The reviewer topped toast with krill meat, salt, pepper, dill, sour cream, pickles, and tomato—exactly what I would do—and got “a bland, slightly shrimpy trainwreck of a lunch.”

Following their lead, I see two viable possibilities here. One would be to mix the drained krill with cream cheese, a bit of Greek yogurt, and aromatics and have that on a bagel, as a sort of shrimp salad. The other, carrying more risk and more potential reward, would be to use it essentially in place of stock. (“This could do wonders to a homemade ramen broth or anything that needs a shrimpy umami kick,” according to Buying Seafood.) What I have in mind is blooming cayenne, smoked paprika, and thyme in oil; sautéing onion, celery, bell pepper, and possibly drained krill; and then adding a pint of vegetable stock, some white wine, salt, black pepper, a Parmesan rind, a pound of frozen shrimp, a bay leaf, and drained krill if I’ve proven too much of a coward to sauté it, simmering for 15 minutes or so, and serving over rice with scissored scallions. (I am not associating krill with a roux for reasons of my own.)

The risks here are clear: I could vomit when I open the can and see the nutritious black eyes staring at me; I could destroy the peace in my home by making it smell like sautéed and simmered krill; and/or I could ruin a perfectly delicious lunch by introducing nutritious eyes and hard bits of chitin. The reward is equally clear: I could discover a convenient though expensive alternative to hoarding shrimp shells and tails in my freezer for months at a time to yield small quantities of shrimp stock. I’m at a loss as to what to do and so turn to you, the reader—email me at poppingtins at substack dot com if you have strong opinions on whether I should risk what I’m contemplating, experience with this horrifying-seeming yet intriguing tin, and/or suggestions for what to do with it that don’t involve making Krill Stuffed Clams. And happy New Year!

When I was a teenager, I worked at a juice shop in SoHo frequented by mildly famous people and a variety of local cranks and eccentrics who got special deals from the owner, a nice guy and a ruthless businessman in the specific way aging hippie entrepreneurs were at the time. In retrospect it seems clear that he was subsidizing the starving-artist set partly out of kindness but also out of self-interest, the idea being that their esoteric orders would impress on a starlet, a guy who used to be in Jawbreaker, or John Lennon’s failson that this was the place to be to get healthy juice. One of the customers drank alarming quantities of carrot juice at least twice a day, and had consequently turned orange; another, who chased triple wheatgrass shots with a pint and a half of kale juice every day, had taken on a distinctly greenish tinge.

Nothing I’ve been told or read about food in the years since has made more of an impression on me than that job did, or done more to make me wary of the idea that because something is good, more of it is better. Not wanting to turn green metaphorically any more than literally, I’ve never been into any kind of supplements. Whatever the benefits of fish oil, for instance, I presume they’re there to be had, and probably best had, by regularly eating moderate amounts of oily fish. Cod liver oil—something I associate with Victorian children’s novels and old people jokingly threatening me with or talking about as something they were forced to endure—has thus been nothing to me but a source of repugnance, my awareness of which represents a link to a vanished past, just like the sense memory of running my finger inside the ashtray set into the arm of an airline seat.

For whatever reason, I’ve never thought of cod liver at all; it was simply a subset of cod liver oil, associated with it as something I don’t think of as food for me any more than I do nootropics. All of this changed recently when a friend asked if I knew of a good canned-fish dealer. I of course recommended Rainbow Tomatoes Garden, my preferred source for its wide selection, excellent service, and good vibes; he got this sampler, which looks great, and I unexpectedly got a store credit for the referral. This brings us around to cod liver oil because the sampler my friend bought contained a tin of cod liver, recommended in this way by Drew Mellon, the man behind the excellent and authoritative Mouth Full of Sardines blog:

Next to Sardines, this is my most consumed tin. Don’t let the word “Liver” scare you off. I like to refer to the cod liver as “Meat Butter” spread it on toast with a dash of salt and pepper! If you like meat and you like butter, well, even if you don’t like meat.

I’m more of a fish and olive oil than a meat butter guy, but still, this spoke to me; while the idea of choking down cod liver oil held no appeal, consuming the organ from which it was extruded did. The rise of the offal-obsessed meat influencer has served as a perpetual reminder not only that a surprising number of men don’t know what sort of physique is only attainable with the use of testosterone and growth hormone but that organs actually are good things to eat; I also don’t think people do things for no reason, and so assume that great-great-grandmothers in their millions forced cod liver oil on millions of great-aunt Marys because they got good effects from doing so, just as I assume that there is a vast bowl of chopped liver in every good deli I’ve ever been in because people order it, and that they order it because they like it.

Store credit in hand, all of this is to say, I made an order at Rainbow Tomatoes Garden and promptly received three tins of cod liver, of which I promptly consumed two. (The third, a gift from generous proprietor Dan Waber, sits proudly in my tin stash.) I now understand the appeal.

The first of the two I tried, Riga Gold, was the less expensive, at a mere $4.50, and comes from “the premier brand of the company GAMMA-A, the largest producer of canned fish in the Baltic states.” All that’s in the tin is cod liver, oil from the cod liver, and a bit of salt. It’s not the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, and it expresses not so much a strong but a deep and rich smell, on which more shortly.

Dan having attached a note strongly advising the can’s consumer to enjoy the rich liver with something acidic, I went what I felt would be a safe route, spreading Dijon mustard on whole-wheat sourdough toast, mashing about half the liver—each can contains 600 calories of, largely, fat—into pâté with salt and pepper, drenching it in lemon, and topping it with spring onions. This didn’t exactly lessen its resemblance to cat food, and in fact both my cat and my dog—the latter a genuine cat-food connoisseur—expressed more interest than they have in any other can I’ve opened in memory. (Both enjoyed the cod liver I didn’t use, the dog more than the cat.)

Mildly apprehensive, I fixed a green salad and an iced tea and made some small talk with my wife, who heroically didn’t ask me to take my lunch elsewhere, about taste being an arbitrary and a pure construct of chance, and then dug in. “Astringent tuna,” I wrote as my only tasting note, and while that isn’t quite right—the flavor is much richer than that of tuna, but much less fishy—it’s close enough. I didn’t love this because I didn’t love the texture, which was a bit slippery for me, but it was completely fine, something I’d probably have liked a bit more if I’d put it on a toasted bagel with something really crunchy like diced red onion, and nothing I’d find unusual if I were served it at the kind of event where people serve pâté on crackers. In fact, I could see myself, if I were in the mood, and if I’d been drinking—and this is definitely a food to have with drinks, if you drink—accidentally eating a lot more of this than would actually be a good idea.

The next day, eager to try some more, I opened my second can, from French brand Mouettes d’Arvor, which makes some of my very favorite sardines. Having done half-assed research into how people eat cod liver, I decided to have it as a sort of salade niçoise, with boiled potatoes and hard-boiled eggs alongside some habanero and cardamom sauerkraut I had in the fridge, which I figured would, between its acidity and crunch and through its being quite hot, complement the bland flavors and textures of everything else quite well.

If I made a questionable decision here, it was in just scooping lumps of cod liver into a mixture of the chopped potatoes and eggs, rather than mashing it up and then mixing it in; this led to irregular placement of lumps of liver. It was fun, though, to spear the quivering blobs through to some potato or egg and then to some spicy sauerkraut, where they melted on the tongue. The dish was good and I’d have it again; spicy pickled green beans would also work really well here. I didn’t notice too much difference, for what it’s worth, between the Mouettes d’Arvor can, which costs $7, and the cheaper Riga one; the pricier one had slightly larger and firmer contiguous pieces of liver, but there wasn’t a hugely noticeable difference in flavor or texture.

In all, I’m not so compelled by cod liver that I’m going to make a point of eating it routinely. Given the way I construct my meals it has a bit less protein and a bit more fat than I usually want out of fish, and with all due respect to influencers who go by names like the Duke of Offal and the Potentate of Pancreas and warn against poisonous peaches and Swiss chard while recommending you eat raw wolf liver twice a day, I’m not particularly looking to megadose on any of the various vitamins which cod liver has in startling abundance. There is one more issue I should note, which is less than the smell of the oil (this isn’t an especially funky tin) than its sheer persistence. I would strongly advise cleaning the tin out for recycling by putting any excess liver or oil in a Ziploc and disposing of it outside before cleaning the can for recycling and not, say, pouring any excess oil down your utility sink. Far be it from me to even suggest one might not recycle the can, but anyone who were to simply put the can and any excess liver or oil in a Ziploc and get rid of it would be rewarded in concrete ways.

Despite all of this—which is a lot of this—I don’t see why cans of the stuff won’t go in my pantry and make their way into my rotation, though; it’s cheap, good, and exceptionally nutritious, and has a different flavor and texture profile from the sardines, mackerel, and mussels I do eat regularly. I’d recommend you try it.

Housekeeping

—Popping Tins gained hundreds of new subscribers (bringing the total to an inexplicable 6,400) after being mentioned in the lede of this excellent Vivian Yee story in the New York Times about how the workings of global capital have made it so that Tunisia, where canned tuna is a ubiquitous and integral part of the food culture, is increasingly subsisting on low-quality, largely imported tuna even as some of the best tuna in the world is fished off and exported from its shores. Welcome to all these new readers and thank you to those I haven’t run off yet!

Lately I’ve been running a lot, which is better for my powers of concentration and sense of well-being than for my appetite; I just came back from a 40-minute run in 88-degree heat and don’t especially want dinner.1 If I had any left, I would do what I did the last two nights and have some braised collards and mussels, which is just substantial enough to work as dinner and just light enough to not feel like it—perfect for the shoulder season between spring and summer.

As previously discussed in this space, mussels are terrific, and terrifically adaptable. One of the best things about them, right up there with their lack of a central nervous system, is that even by the standards of tinned seafood they require little work or thought. Sardines, to take one fish often lauded here, aren’t exactly demanding, but unless you’re going to have them on crackers—which is a good idea, of course—they do require at least a little consideration of how you’re going to serve them and what you’re going to have them with, which mussels don’t. They’re easy to fish out of the can and don’t require any attention to how to break them up or present them, and the better ones, including such omnipresent ones as Patagonia’s, come in sauces that are quite good and enough by themselves to jazz up some plain rice or pasta. They’re also, crucially, fairly neutral. I like sardines more than the next person but there are definitely a lot of flavors they don’t go with or overwhelm, and textures they don’t work with. Mussels don’t go with everything, but they don’t tend to take over, and a mussel works a bit differently in a forkful of food than a chunk of dismembered fish torso does. In the winter, I’ll just plop a can into the tomato-based vegetable soups and stews I favor; in the summer, they work great with things that are light.

As mentioned above, one thing I’ve been enjoying them with is collards. At least in Southeast Pennsylvania, it’s pretty much always a good time to eat collards, but this is an especially good one. Everything coming from the farms is bright and vibrant and peppery and full of life, which makes for great stock to braise them in.

I’ve been making my collards with smoked garlic, which gives them a great depth and body—maybe not quite as much as using pork, but then smoked garlic brings the many significant advantages associated with not being pork. I sauté half an onion and five or so cloves in a wok with Penzeys’ Turkish seasoning, bring a couple of cups of stock2 to a simmer, toss in two pounds of stemmed collards cut into thin strips crosswise, cover it, and more or less leave it alone for half an hour, stirring every so often just to let the steam out. Sometimes I sauté some shiitakes, too, or toss in some red pepper. I recently had a bowl of this—I recommend plenty of the stock in the bottom—under some Patagonia smoked mussels I just poured on top and felt like I’d pitched into a campfire. It was great. Even better was having it with Island Creek’s mussels in pickled sauce. Like the Patagonias and many other good mussels, these were harvested in Galicia. (“These mussels were grown on floating rafts using rope culture before being harvested by mariscadoras,” assert marketing materials keen to position the viscous rocks as an artisanal, single-origin product. “Shellfishing in Galicia is highly restricted, so licenses are often passed down through generations, often staying within families,” etc.) They have a rich flavor with hints of brine and a texture that I’d describe as firm yet juicy if that weren’t a disgusting sounding way to describe a mollusk; absurd adjectives that come to mind include confident and assertive, and yet they’re laid back. I’m not always a fan of mussels in piquant sauces, but these have exactly the right kind of mild tartness to balance out earthy greens; those and a bit of leftover mushroom and asparagus risotto and some fermented carrot-ginger slaw hit me as essentially the perfect thing to have when I didn’t very much want to eat but knew I’d get irritable if I didn’t.

(Let me just say here as a side note that while I’m not going to try to prove this because I don’t like to publish photos of things I’ve cooked because the sheer number of bleak, tragic food photos I see online makes me think this is an area where discretion is the better part of valor, and while aesthetics vary, I think mussels are gorgeous, especially ones in vividly-colored sauces like the ones I’m recommending. I in fact think they’re just about the easiest way there is to make something that’s not just attractive but will amaze others, as long as they’re allowed to present some contrast. Put them on brown rice and they might look like mud, but put the same ones on white rice alongside some brightly-colored vegetables and you’ll come off like a visitor from the color dimension, where everything tastes better and is fun to eat.)

I had meant to write this just to recommend collards and mussels, but last night, about three nights past the night I should have gone grocery shopping and didn’t, I achieved a new success in early summer mussel use. I was faced with the twin dilemmas that I didn’t have all that much to make and that no one was all that hungry; happily, someone in the house suggested pasta and sauce, though unhappily, all we had was canned whole tomatoes and someone else in the house was not a fan of chunky sauce. I hand-crushed the tomatoes (not finely enough it turned out) and cooked them down in oil and garlic and eventually basil; made some penne and finished it in the sauce; and microwaved some asparagus that was so vibrant I was surprised it didn’t sing to me. I then added some of Patagonia’s sofrito mussels—pretty much like the smoked ones but with colorful aromatics instead of smokiness—on top and found myself rolling my eyes around in my head and devouring it, as it added just the hit of umami and heartiness you might want with a tomato sauce without any real heaviness. This was mussels working at their best and I hadn’t even pre-warmed the mussels in their tin, which I absolutely should have as it would have softened them and made them even more velvety, which is another repulsive way to describe something I’m claiming you should eat. Don’t pay attention to my questionable word choices, I say—defeat summer with mussels!

Tomorrow would kindly inquire something about you. A setback of the heart sat down once more. A stumbling first step is not enough. A token of gratitude sat down once more. A setback of the heart jumps both ways. Edit me for a test.

The editorial position of this publication, based in its proprietor’s philosophical convictions, is that cooking with tinned seafood is generally to be avoided. This isn’t because it isn’t worth the effort—I will never eat anything in a restaurant as good as the salmon croquettes my grandmother could make out of, as far as I can recall, a can of salmon, an egg, and some breadcrumbs—but because you, or at least I, rapidly hit the point of diminishing returns with tinned seafood, which is (usually) by definition already cooked perfectly. If you have time, cook something that needs to be cooked; if you don’t try out some mackerel with your leftovers has generally been my way of thinking about things.

For this reason, I was skeptical when I learned about Tin to Table: Snacky, Fancy Recipes for Tin-Thusiasts and A-Fish-Ionados, the new book from Anna Hezel, a senior editor at Epicurious. “What would I do with recipes for something that doesn’t need to be cooked—pitch them in the trash?” I wondered. When I was sent a promotional copy of the book, though—along with, ethics in journalism require me to disclose, four high-quality tins, none of which I have yet cracked—I figured I should at least look at it, and when I did, I was delighted. Reader, I strongly recommend this book to you.

I love cookbooks; along with mental reconstructions of watching various relatives cook in childhood, good ones are my ideal source of recipes, even if a depressing amount of recipes I actually use are derived from robots and humans aspiring to be robots. They have a sensibility; this cookbook has a sensibility. It’s structured partly as a novice-level introduction to tinned seafood, breaking down types of seafood and specific brands, and partly as a set of instructions for making accompaniments to and snacks, salads, sandwiches, and entrees out of canned seafood, with a strong emphasis on not-really-cooking; overall it’s an expression of a belief that if you have some tins, a knife, some acids, and a bit of time, you can eat well without it taking up your life. The overwhelmed novice and the war-weary veteran looking to pep up yet another tin will thus both find this all-encompassing, like the Trouser Record Guide. Here is how to make a beautiful romesco sauce, it says, and here is how to fry capers, and here, independently, is how to put a romesco sauce and fried capers together with some mackerel to make something a little nicer than mackerel on Triscuits with a squirt of Cholula. Or make some deviled eggs with pickled mussels! It’s been in my pantry for a couple of weeks and seems likely to eventually have its spine fall off, the highest recommendation I can give.

Rainbow Tomatoes Garden, often touted here as the best source for tinned seafood, has the book for sale, and also has a combination pack consisting of the book and tins Hezel has recommended for sale. I enthusiastically recommend either. Hezel answered a few questions from Popping Tins recently; our exchange has been lightly edited for clarity, but my stupid questions have been left alone. I’m off to make, or think about making, sardine curry puffs, which I’m pretty sure I can make even though I cook like I was just whacked in the back of the head with a shovel.

Popping Tins: What got you into tinned fish? For a lot of people I know it's something they associated with childhood, figured they'd outgrown at a certain point, and then rediscovered in adulthood—was that the case for you, or did you have a different route into things?

Anna Hezel: I grew up eating a lot of grocery store canned tuna and chopped clams and sort of graduated to sardines after college, and then when I went to Portugal in 2017, I was excited to learn that there was a whole world out there of small, family-owned canneries and hand-made products other than the three or four brands you see in every American grocery store. It's like beer or wine—you can try something new every week and still never run out of new tins to try.

PT: What is your favorite kind of tinned fish, and which brand makes your favorite tin of it? Related but distinct question—what's your favorite inexpensive tinned fish?

AH: Sardines will always have my heart. And for me, I can't get sick of Nuri Spiced Sardines in Olive Oil. Piri piri, cloves, bay leaf. They're just the best. I also find it very charming that they make an extra spicy version, where they just add these cartoon flames to this very old-school Portuguese three-color label. For an inexpensive tin: I eat a lot of the Matiz sardines in olive oil, which I think are amazing quality for about $5. Also, Naoko Takei Moore, whose donabe sardine rice I riffed on in my book, turned me on to the King Oscar Tiny Tots.

PT: What's your favorite recipe in the book? Related but distinct questions—what are the most fun things for you to make and to serve?

AH: It's hard to pick a favorite recipe, but the one that friends have cooked the most and spoken the most effusively about is the Spaghetti with Fancy Clams and Fancy Ham. It's basically a white clam sauce made with cockles (fancy clams), and topped with a big wavy piece of crispy prosciutto (fancy ham). The combo works kind of like how clams and bacon work together on a pizza.

I also find myself making the smoked trout dip all the time, because you can make it really glamorous for a party, piled with trout roe and chives, and served with potato chips, but then I'll also happily eat the leftovers on toasted bagels, saltines, whatever.

PT: What do you think the best thing to serve to a guest who's tinned fish-curious but worried they might be repulsed is?

AH: I might go with something smoked here! So many of the smoked tinned fishes just taste like freshly smoked or grilled fish. Smoked salmon deviled eggs ... smoked trout dip ... smoked mackerel onigiri.

PT: In some ways this book is an ode to a nicely-stocked pantry. What are the most important and most overlooked staples you think people should have to get the most out of their tins?

AH: Tinned fish people are all about their hot sauces and chili crisps. Hot sauce and chili crisp are important. Also important in my opinion: a really good sherry vinegar (to drizzle on clams or cockles, use in dressings, etc), and harissa (I like this one from Zwita) to have with tuna and olives and bread.

PT: I think a lot of the appeal of tinned fish is that if you're busy or working in a tiny apartment kitchen or (like me) have minimal to nonexistent cooking skills, you can still put together something that looks and tastes and is quite fancy without a huge investment of time or effort—something your recipes show off really well. How do you think that translates or relates to cooking not involving tinned fish?

AH: Totally. It's kind of a semi-homemade mentality (thank you, Sandra Lee). It can be fun to look around the kitchen (or freezer) and see what convenience items I have (frozen dumplings! a jar of olives! a sleeve of saltines! 200 cans of fish!) and then start to try to turn them into a meal. 

PT: One of the fun things about this book is how many different cuisines are represented. What do you think the commonalities are among the cooking traditions that work best with tinned fish?

AH: I think a lot of the dishes that work so well involve a lot of fresh ingredients and a lot of textural variety. Eunjo Park, who used to be the chef at Kawi in Manhattan, contributed a kimbap recipe to the book where you mix tuna (just regular canned water-packed tuna) with mayo and gochujang, and then it gets rolled into warm rice along with crunchy danmuji, perilla leaves, spinach, and carrots. There's so much happening in every bite.

PT: At root, tinned fish is a convenience food, something I at least was raised to be skeptical of on sophistication and health grounds; it was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me to realize this stuff can be quite fancy and fresher than lots of stuff you can get from a fishmonger. Do you see any other convenience foods ripe for a similar reevaluation?

AH: There are some very exciting moves being made in the world of instant noodles right now. Brands like Momofuku and Omsom are getting in the game, and I think we're going to see a ton more in the next few years. My work from home lunches will definitely benefit from this, so the more the better to break up the tinned fish routine.

Email Popping Tins at poppingtins@substack.com.

I’ve made many mistakes in my life, enough that I’ve seriously considered just writing out all the things I’ve done that I profoundly regret, am deeply embarrassed by, and/or present themselves as recurring intrusive thoughts, always abandoning the idea because I’d want to read the results even less than anyone else would. Among these mistakes is making a large quantity of soba noodles in peanut sauce and crispy tofu the other night even though I’m the only person who lives in my house who likes soba noodles in peanut sauce and even though I have a refrigerator full of things I need to eat before they go bad, few of which go with soba noodles in peanut sauce. Grimly determined, for no logical reason, not to waste these particular leftovers, I decided, for no particular reason, that I would have turn to what I turn to every time I have a cooking situation in need of fixing—the tinned-seafood shelf in my pantry, which right now has more mackerel on it than I know what to do with. Given that at root what I was after was getting more protein in my lunch without having to do any work, could I simply have had some kefir (or for that matter roasted more tofu) rather than cracking these tins? Yes, but then I wouldn’t have done anything to lessen the mackerel stockpile, which is currently threatening to overflow its dedicated shelf.

As Popping Tins has previously reported, peanuts and canned seafood are a questionable pairing, no matter how much you like one or the other or both—which isn’t to say they don’t go. Certainly peanuts and fish do, as many people from Southeast Asia and West Africa (as well as the authors of dubious recipes engineered to rise to the top of lists of search-engine results) could tell you, but the specifics matter, a lovely cod fillet just out of the deep fryer with a luscious, velvety sauce presumably being somewhat different from a $1.00 can of brislings in soybean oil topped with Jif.

I had the peanut element down; while my sauce will win zero awards, it’s also perfectly fine, being made of plain peanut butter, tamari, garlic, sriracha, brown sugar, lime juice, and water. The issue was the fish.

If I were to use one descriptive to describe mackerel, it would be “unpredictable.” Really that’s because there’s no such thing as a mackerel, just as there’s no such thing as a sardine, the words in this context being marketing terminology for dozens of different species of generally small fish from different climates. I get tins containing fish resembling delicately butter-poached mahi-mahi, gristly lumps sprouting bone in every direction, and everything in between, and which range in presentation from small, perfectly-cut fillets to whole fish packed four to the tin. What pretty much all mackerel has in common is that it’s firm and oily without being dense or heavy. I certainly don’t mind the kind that have bones and skin (more nutrition and texture, I say), but the kind without are good, and while I prefer light, fresh fish packed in olive oil, mackerel also frequently comes in sweet, heavy sauces that are pretty good if you’re in the mood for that sort of thing.

Not quite knowing what I was in for, for my first peanut butter and mackerel experiment, I opened a tin of Bela mackerel in organic extra virgin olive oil, which I got at my local co-op for $4 and is available pretty much everywhere. I picked this because Bela’s smoked sardines are my default inexpensive sardine, so I figured their mackerel would be good.

This fish let me down a bit when I cracked the can, though that’s mostly a matter of personal taste. I prefer flaky mackerel cut like the Matiz I wrote about here to full fish torsos, which to me tend to basically resemble slightly drier sardines; it might just be a matter of presentation, but the former seem a bit cleaner and lighter to me, while the latter seem a bit heavier. Undaunted, I heaped my noodles cold in a bowl next to a pile of quick-pickled red cabbage and red peppers, topped them with the mackerel, green onion, and lime juice and dug in, twirling up big bites of noodles and spearing mackerel halves on the end of the fork. It was … fine. Really the biggest issue was that I once again experienced the curious, mutually negatory effect that peanuts and oily fish can have on each other. I’d thought the acid of the cabbage and lime, along with the acid and heat in the sauce itself, would cut through, but they didn’t, and I was too lazy to do anything about it.

Rather than make a joke about misattributed inspirational quotes having to do with failure like I was intending to1, you can imagine me doing so here and then moving on to my second try at this, which was essentially the same as the first with the key differences that I reheated the noodles this time (this didn't matter so much) and that I used a can that's been taunting me for weeks (this did).

I picked this tin up at Asianfresh, a grocery store on 10th Street in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, for I think $1.89. As an immaculately grilled and seasoned bit of tuna loin that sells for $48.95 at a wine bar does not, it represents a kind of fish people all over the world actually eat—of slightly dubious provenance, packed in a sauce that threatens to be cloying, featuring imagery of beady-eyed or frightened sea creatures, and apparently meant more as cheap protein than as expressions of an ineffable essence. Cans like this are sometimes terrific and sometimes foul, and since I couldn’t find useful reviews on the English-language internet (the brand being much better known for its smoked eel), I cracked it with eager anticipation.

This is not the most visually appealing fish, coming in 50g lumps bristling with bones; I’m using this unrevealing image of the inside of the can because I forgot to take a better one. (You can find imagery of the fish itself, as well as get another perspective on it, from this reviewer on Youtube.) I flaked two big lumps and dressed them with on the noodles with some of the sauce, then mixed the whole thing up, really working the fish through to ensure it would end up in every forkful. This was far more like it—while I’m not quite sure what I’m after here, this was a lot closer to it. While the alleged chili sauce lacked any bite, the sweet tartness of the tomato (along with a bit of chili oil) coating the peanut-coated noodles did provide the pop lacking in the first iteration of this lunch, with the bold meatiness of the fish itself not only grounding every bite with an earthiness the Bela didn’t, but contrasting well to the slipperiness of the noodles and the crunch of the vegetables. I didn’t add on some cumin-pickled radishes and onions I had in the refrigerator because I thought that might be a few too many things going on at once, but I regretted it later.

Further experimentation is temporarily on hold, as someone else who lives in my house consumed the last serving of spare noodles despite seeming not to like them very much, and I have other leftovers I need to eat. I’ll be making noodles again, though, with plans in mind involving almond butter, gochujang, and a lovely-looking can of Spanish mackerel in olive oil I was gifted; I also have two tins of Japanese mackerel in heavy, sweet soy sauces that are calling out to me. Summer is coming, too, and with it perhaps an Amoroso roll smeared with peanut sauce and piled high with fish (possibly even another kind) and tart, crunchy vegetables. I will report back.

Housekeeping

—Stay tuned for a special edition of this newsletter probably later this week, in which I believe better advice will be given for what to do with a tin of fish than I am capable of giving.

—Men, what is keeping you from dressing like Gordon Gano?

A couple of weeks ago, for reasons I now can’t reconstruct, I found myself in an online rabbithole learning about natto, a Japanese dish of fermented soybeans I’d never had and which I surmised many internet users were making sound a lot stranger and both more and less interesting than it actually is. Broadly, I read several sorts of things about it. The first sort, seemingly written by robots or real humans attempting to write like robots (and generally succeeding), lauded it for its unique concentrations of various nutrients, identified it as a superfood, and credited long Japanese lifespans to it, sometimes intimating that Japanese people do little other than eat it. The second sort was seemingly written by Westerners mainly interested in congratulating themselves for having discovered and consumed an exotic and/or offensive food; the ones who enjoyed it generally called it sticky and compared it to a funky cheese, while the ones who didn’t called it slimy and compared it to funky socks. The third sort was written by people familiar with Japan—mainly, though not entirely, Japanese people—explaining that some people like natto a lot and eat it for breakfast every day, that some people don’t like it at all, and that there are significant differences among types of natto, though mostly they don’t signify much; in all, they came off something like I imagine I might if I found myself explaining cream cheese to legitimately curious foreigners1. After I watched this video about a New York natto manufacturer, which I highly recommend on the grounds that it’s cool, I decided I had to try some. This sent me on a quest to Essene Market, an old-school health food store, which didn’t have any from the New York brand but did have some convenient single-serve packages from a Vermont brand.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I had my newly-acquired natto with canned fish. Before we get to that, though—and we will, for anyone currently on the verge of rage-closing this newsletter before emailing me to admonish me to stick to fish—let’s look inside one of those packages of natto.

Here it is straight from the refrigerator; as you’ll note, it basically looks like soybeans that have been in the refrigerator. This brand didn’t come with little packets of soy sauce and mustard, which to my understanding natto usually does in Japan, but this is a fish newsletter, not a place to litigate questions of authenticity in a performatively anguished way, so I shrugged, figuring that buying Vermont natto in Philadelphia was not in any event going to lead to an authentic experience like that had by some dude buying food in styrofoam in a Tokyo 7-11, and dumped it in a bowl.

This was a necessary prerequisite for what everyone I’d encountered in my online rabbithole who seemed worth paying attention to agreed was, if not necessary, certainly something to try, and perhaps the crucial next step: stirring the stuff vigorously. I lost count but surely got up over a couple of hundred stirs, resulting in this:

The goop there is the result, to my understanding, of whipping air into the bacterial film coating the soybeans, which creates a foamy and sticky substance that is tremendously fun to play with, kind of like a thinner version of the slime kids make with Elmer’s glue. (If you have any kids younger than 6 or so around, they’d probably like it.) It also, at least in my case, with this one brand—I’m not going to speak to natto more generally since I have very little experience with it—activated a pungent funk, which was about as strong as, and quite akin to, a reasonably funky cheese. Whether that sounds good or not is a matter of taste; I was nonplussed, while an associate whose tastes run more toward the mild and the bland than mine do found it quite strong and not especially pleasant, if not offensive.

I plated the natto on top of a cup of rice with quick-pickled red cabbage, scallions, and sesame seeds, along with a can of Cole’s smoked rainbow trout in olive oil. Readers interested in trout might want to read the last edition of this newsletter; the Cole’s was excellent, not quite as good as the JOSE brand I’ve previously raved about but, at about half the cost, a far better value, firm and moist and flaky with a vibrant skin and just a hint of smokiness.

It was an ideal complement to the natto, partly because while it’s nowhere near so slimy as it looks, it does benefit from something a bit more firm (the red cabbage was a good choice for this reason; kimchi would also work) and partly because the mild smokiness paired perfectly with the overwhelming flavor of the natto, which was … coffee! I haven’t had coffee in five years because I don’t like it, but loved it here.

The next day, I decided to have basically the same lunch, with steamed broccoli instead of cabbage (it was perfectly fine but in the future I’ll stick to vegetables with more snap to them), soy sauce and chili sauce in the natto (recommended), and Matíz wild-caught mackerel in extra virgin olive oil. This turned out to be a great choice. The mackerel was slightly firmer than the trout, and also slightly more strongly flavored, which worked; it was also more visually interesting, because while it appears to be taupe, when the fillets are cut open they’re a pleasing pinkish red, like something that just came off the grill.

Cole and Matíz are excellent brands, widely available, affordable enough to be more an indulgence than a luxury, and of comparable quality to cans twice the price. (The cans mentioned here absolutely pass the “Would these be good on crackers with hot sauce?” test, which is probably the most important one of all.) They’re always recommended, and having had it twice now, I’d certainly recommend natto as well. While I don’t like the concept of superfood (it’s redolent of grifting and unhealthy obsession; unless a doctor says otherwise it seems best to me to just eat a wide variety of whole foods), it really does have a lot of health benefits2, and that aside, it's not quite like anything else I've ever had. I can see where "Foamy beans with powerful overtones of coffee and the pungency of a good cheese" might not be appealing, or might strike someone as something only be tried as a stunt, but if you subscribe to a canned-seafood newsletter I don't think it will be all that far out there for you, and you just might like it a lot.

No fish has such wonderful associations for me as trout does. I think of Huck Finn eating it with eggs, fried over an open fire, right from the pan (Huck Finn didn’t actually do this, but I’m for some reason convinced he did); or the famous shed over the Calumet River on the South Side of Chicago where they sell smoked trout that melts in your mouth; or Captain Beefheart; or Franz Schubert; or Kilgore Trout; or (of course) Mike Trout. I haven’t had a fishing license since I was in grade school, but every year I tell myself I’m going to get one and lay siege to the trout in the Wissahickon, and I’ll probably even get around to it.

Among its many other virtues, trout tins up as well as any other fish—maybe even better than any other. If you were drawing up a Venn diagram to characterize commonly canned fish in terms of price, availability, healthfulness, ecological impact, flavor, texture, and—not important to me, but important to many—not being overwhelmingly fishy, it would sit precisely at the point where every one of these considerations overlap; in addition, while it has a ceiling as high as any fish, it also has a fairly high floor. I’ve had some truly revolting tins of such ubiquitous fish as salmon, sardines, and tuna, and while I’m sure there’s some nasty trout out there, the worst I’d say about trout I’ve ever had is that it was a bit bland. Recently, I ate five tins of trout, ranging from the good to the truly superb, and I now just want more.

This was an experiment. Two of the tins were from Trader Joe’s, and I knew them to be reliable; the other three were expensive ones I bought at Herman’s Coffee, the South Philly tinned-seafood (and many other excellent things) destination. I go there every once in a while and buy three or four tins, because they always have new and unusual ones alongside my favorites like this, and these usually form the core of my tins-to-try stockpile; the last time I was there, knowing a person enthusiastic about trout would be staying over during the holidays, I bought an intriguing tin I’d never seen before. Knowing my stash contained the Trader Joe’s trout and a favorite tin to serve as controls, as well another intriguing-looking but unconsumed tin, I had all I needed for science.

The first tin I tried was Trader Joe’s skinless smoked trout, which I had twice—once over lentil soup in which I’d wilted baby spinach, and once over kale alongside rice and black beans and a runny fried egg. (I didn’t have it twice in a row, but between the second and third of the fancy ones.) This isn’t a tin that’s going to inspire rapturous odes, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be a tin that inspires rapturous odes; it’s a straightforward and honest one for weekday lunches and snacking. The fish flakes well, has a pleasing and not overwhelming smokiness to it, and would make an excellent point of entry for anyone new to trout. It’s … trout—firm but yielding, meaty yet delicate, distinctively fishy without being all that fishy, and with, in all, a perhaps more convincing claim to be the chicken of the sea (or at least lake or river) than tuna. If I have any objections to it, it’s that it’s bit on the drier side and that it’s packed in canola rather than olive oil, but these aren’t a big deal at all, especially since packing the fish in something I wouldn’t immediately want to sop up with bread is presumably a lot of what keeps it at around $3 a can. Along with the sockeye salmon, this is my favorite Trader Joe’s fish, and a real pantry staple. One suggestion: It benefits a lot, even more than the usual tin, from heat and/or acidity, however you prefer those delivered. Lemon juice and jalapeños worked for me this go-round, and next time I’m going to try some sambal oelek.

My next tin was one over which I’ve previously rhapsodized, the JOSE Gourmet smoked trout fillets in olive oil. I was almost hesitant to try it because I’d enjoyed the first tin I had so much, but it was just as good the second time. At its best the canning process preserves the fish in all its freshness, capturing the air and water and a sense of place in a way there’s probably some (likely Portuguese) word for that isn’t terroir but means much the same thing, and this tin does that as well as any I’ve ever had, more than justifying its outrageously over the top promotional copy (as well as its outrageous price). These are firm yet buttery fillets with beautiful skin attractively presented, bright and dense and subtly smoky; I had them with black beans, white rice, avocado, red pepper slices, and green onions, and if I had that for lunch every day for a while I don’t think I’d mind. The visiting trout enthusiast was every bit as impressed as I was, proclaiming the trout “blends well,” flavor- and texture-wise. “It just adds a little bit,” they said. “It’s smooth. Not too oily, either. Whenever I add tinned fish to something I worry it will be too oily.”

At this point, I was prepared for my next tin, Fangst’s smoked Danish freshwater trout with juniper and lemon, or Regnbue Ørred, to be something of a letdown, not just because the JOSE was so good but because I had bought it on a lark—with an open mind and in a spirit of curiosity, but prepared to be revolted. As is the case with a seemingly increasing number of cans of fish, this one came with a charming if perhaps not strictly necessary backstory (“In his childhood, Martin co-founder of FANGST, enjoyed his many visits on trout farms with his father,” etc.) but more important to me it came with juniper. I hadn’t, to my knowledge, had juniper before, and associated it with the opening cutscene of Skyrim; in the event it was a non-issue, and herb-wise the heavier notes came from some thyme. This is a lot of throat-clearing ahead of saying I liked this a lot. I had it on sautéd kale with black beans, rice, and parmesan. It was fresh and firm and, curiously, flaked evenly horizontally as well as vertically, making it fun to pick apart and eat on forkfuls of other stuff, dipped in chili sauce. It had an earthiness to it, and a bit of a bite, and didn’t taste like gin at all. For the money I’d go with the JOSE, but this is a fine tin.

As things turned, I’d inadvertently built up to the main event. The next tin I opened was one about which I knew nothing other than that it was trout; that it was more specifically marked as “TRUTA AGLIO OLIO,” which could mean a lot of things; and that it had cost a $18. Reader, the trout was covered in mayonnaise, and this was, at minimum, as good a tin as any I’ver had. My tasting notes reveal me to have been totally inadequate to the task of describing what this actually tastes like, containing words and phrases like “luxurious,” “wont take photo bc afraid of real food writers, ones who use words like ‘jammy,’” “a riot of flavors and textures,” “The one tin that gave me a real sense of eating like a king,” and “eating like an emperor.” After my first tentative bite, I was moved to move around the house, wielding the tin.

“Wow,” said the visiting enthusiast, a taciturn person from whom this was the highest praise. “That’s really good. Smooth, creamy, and it doesn’t overwhelm the trout. The trout is really good.”

“I don’t like where you’re going with this!” said a resident anti-enthusiast at whom I thrust the tin, explaining that this was as good a tin as I’d ever had, like fishy mayonnaise but really good. “Don’t drag fish around,” they replied. Daunted, I returned to the dining room, where I corrupted the experiment by enjoying the trout not with legume-based mush, as I had the previous ones, but with toasted sourdough, pickled beets, and quick-pickled red cabbage. I regret nothing. The trout melted in my mouth along with the emulsion. It was rapturous.

Quarter-assed research reveals that this tin is the ABC+ Trout Fillets Aglio e Olio. ABC+ is described as “Portugal’s smallest cannery” on the website of Caputo’s, a Salt Lake City-area purveyor of fancy foods that sells its products. (“Recipes for sardines in EVOO, lemon, and tomato are tried and true, but ABC+ builds on that tradition by developing new, elevated recipes preserved in distinctively round hand-sealed cans,” reads copy on the site.) It appears—plot twist!—to enjoy some sort of relationship with JOSE, which I say partly because a San Francisco-area wine store markets the tins as “ABC+ by Jose Gourmet” and partly because the JOSE website features ABC+ products, placing them on par, design-wise, with its own. I could ferret out the nature of this relationship with an email, but ferreting out the nature of relationships is the sort of thing I do professionally and I just don’t want to. What matters is that ABC+ appears to be a mad science lab of tinning, not only turning one of the most disgusting-sounding combinations imaginable in high-grade trout slathered in what is functionally mayonnaise (“a simple and creamy sauce where the fresh flavors of garlic and parsley take center stage,” claims the Caputo’s website) into the food of the gods, but selling things like trout fillets in dill pickles, trout fillets in onion relish, and mackerel fillets in curry. I’m going to have to try them all.

Housekeeping

—Happy New Year! I hope everything is going great with you. Since the last edition I read and consequently would like to recommend the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which I enjoyed more than I would have thought possible, and not just because it proves that popular culture is not only not in decline since, but hasn’t really changed much in basic ways since, the 19th century by featuring a set-up for the Palliser novels, a second series of novels set in the same universe, worked in so shamelessly that it makes the scene in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in which Wonder Woman watches trailers for upcoming DC movies look subtle.

—Hopefully the next newsletter will be about a new cannery that daunted me by sending me an enormous quantity of fish. If you would like me to review a product you make or sell feel free to email; I can’t promise I’ll like it or write about it, obviously, but I will sincerely attempt to do both.

As far as I can tell, up until a few weeks ago I was one of the last few dozen people in the United States who had yet to “get into beans.” I’m not sure this makes much sense, since someone who routinely eats $10 tins of fish guts for lunch would, you’d think, be open-minded about an expensive version of a pantry staple, but skepticism of a spate of people seeming to performatively substitute bean consumption for a personality (said the resident of a glass house, wielding his rock) and, more basically, of $8 bags of beans kept me in the darkness until, on a whim, I bought a bag of Rancho Gordo pinto beans at a fancy-goods store in the Philadelphia suburbs and saw the light.

Naturally, the first thing I did with my fancy beans was have them with sardines, and it was a revelation; the biggest problem I’m having is that I don’t especially want to eat anything else for lunch, nor is there any real reason to, since a bowl of brothy beans and fish and vegetables gives you pretty much everything you need and can easily be changed up every day so you don’t get bored of it. It also has some secondary benefits I find useful, like being a good way to use lesser sardines (the beans make a worthy backdrop to your finest tin, to be clear, but are also rich and flavorful enough to compensate for the flatness of a mediocre tin in a way that even really good rye or sourdough isn’t) and easy to make ahead of time (a pound of dried beans makes enough for a weeks’ worth of lunches and doesn’t take up too much space in the fridge). Here is how I do that:

I start with about a half pound apiece of coarsely chopped carrots, celery, mushrooms, and onions, and will throw in other stuff, like leek greens or tomatoes, in about the same quantity if I have extra I want to use up or just have some laying around. (One thing I’ve learned over the years is that vegetable-trimming stock based on frozen scraps is a lie—or, if not a lie, not worthy of the claims people make for it; it’s always satisfying to make something edible out of what otherwise would have been compost, but if you want something really good it helps to start with good, fresh ingredients, rather than semi-garbage.) I heat some oil over medium heat, toss a couple of small-to-medium chili peppers and at least five big, smashed cloves of garlic in with the vegetables, and sauté until the onions are translucent, then add a Parmesan rind, a dried ancho, a lot of black pepper (I don’t add salt because that comes later, when cooking the beans), a couple of big pinches of dried thyme, and 10 cups of water. Then I put a lid on, bring it about up to a boil, lower it to a low simmer, and leave it alone for an hour, after which I strain it and stick it in the fridge (or leave it on the counter) for a while to chill (or cool down a bit).

Once I’m ready to make the beans I just rinse them, toss them in a big pot, and cover them with the broth by about two inches. (This should leave over about two cups, most of which you’ll end up adding to the pot to replace evaporated liquid.) Then I add a fair amount of good chili powder, a bay leaf, a strip of rinsed kombu, and a lot of cumin (as in I add too much cumin, then add some more), and bring it all up, uncovered, to a hard boil. At this point I add in three tablespoons of my second-best olive oil, let it boil for 15 minutes, and bring it down to “bubbles barely breaking the surface” heat with the lid on the pot but ajar. Then I let it go, checking every half hour or so to give a gentle stir and see if I need to add just a bit more of the stock; after about an hour, the beans are starting to get tender, at which point I salt it (you can salt whenever you want, and while I use very little, if you’re more into it maybe about a tablespoon) and add a bit of liquid if it needs it. (This is also a good time to fish out the kombu if you haven’t yet, since it can dissolve in the beans if left too long.) Depending on the kind of bean—I use pintos, black beans, and pinquitos, from Rancho Gordo, which tend to take about two and a half hours in all, and find ones from the bulk bin at my local hippie store can take considerably longer—it can take anywhere from another half hour to several hours for the beans to be done. What “done” is is a matter of taste once they’ve reached a certain tenderness; I like to leave them until they’re pretty tender and just covered by a saucy broth and mash some up with a masher, then squeeze about a third of a lemon in and add a little liquid and let them go another 10 or 15 minutes.

Anyway! Now you have some beans, firm and creamy and piquant and potentially with a bit of a kick depending on what kind of chili peppers you used and as different from a perfectly fine can of beans off the shelf as a truly fine tin of fish is from one you’d find at a gas station. I pour a cup over a handful of spinach in a big bowl and add half an avocado, red pepper slices, green onions, and a drained tin of sardines, breaking the poor creatures’ corpses up into bite-sized chunks and distributing them like chunks of franks in franks-and-beans (a food I remember fondly from childhood and on some level hope is no longer familiar to our nation’s youths) if it’s a lesser tin and leaving them intact on top of the beans if it’s a greater one, in the latter case savoring the sardines by the half with just a bit of beans and vegetables on each forkful. The smokiness of a good sardine is a near-perfect complement to the beans, and if the weakness of the dish is its lack of textural contrast (something peppers and green onions can only go so far in mitigating), a firm sardine is still quite distinct from the beans. Mussels and mackerel also go well with beans prepared this way. I’m going to try some trout tomorrow.

Housekeeping

—Speaking of trout, while I’ve threatened this before, I’m going to try to write this newsletter more often; there are books about tinned seafood that are worth writing about, and many varieties of fish that I’ve enjoyed recently. For a while I was hung up on writing about some garfish, which I really disliked even though rationally there was no reason to (they were firm, meaty little tubes of oil, which describes sardines). I felt guilty about writing about something I disliked when there are so many good tins to write about, especially when this was something I disliked because I disliked it and not because it was bad, and then guilty about not finishing something I’d started, and the end result was writing nothing. Terrible! Here’s what I wrote about the garfish before I gave up, and a photo of them:

One of my many weaknesses as a tinned-seafood enthusiast is that I’m squeamish. I don’t want to see, let alone eat, the beady eyes of baby eels; the sound alone of the word “geoduck” is enough to put me off the idea of ever trying it; I regard any kind of sea life I haven’t had as presumptively repulsive; and I generally understand why some people are incredulous at the idea of regarding small Mediterranean sea creatures preserved in oil or brine as delicacies. What makes things worse is that I often come across vile, noxious foods—a pricey scorpionfish paté the color and consistency of cheap cat food that expresses its fishy essence with the intensity espresso does coffee, for instance, or quality mollusks drowned in thin, syrupy oils that taste like something that would sluice from a synthetic android. I regard new things with suspicion.

Lately, I’ve been tormented by a tin of XXX brand garfish in olive oil I bought on a whim months ago. I keep cans of seafood stacked a bit above eye level in my pantry, where I pass them probably dozens of times a day, and while it would be a bit much to say that the more I passed them the more the garfish operated as a kind of resonant novelistic symbol of my increasing unwillingness to try new things, they were definitely looming at me every time I went to get some eggs.

—I’ve really enjoyed the first two episodes of this season of Articles of Interest. It’s (broadly) about Ivy style, which was the subject of Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style, one of my favorite books from last year. I would definitely recommend either.

A general principle of mine is that you shouldn’t cook, or do much to, tinned seafood. (If you’re in the mood to cook something, it usually doesn’t make sense to cook something that’s already been cooked and doesn’t require you to dirty a pan.) One exception is Les Mouettes d’Arvor sardines with persillade, which you can buy here. They’re nearly perfect. (All of the sardines I’ve had from this company have been excellent and if a tin looks good it probably is.)

Sardines offer lots of protein, calcium, vitamin B12, good fats, etc. with relatively little mercury and relatively few calories, cheaply, making them, in all, a near-ideal complement to an otherwise largely vegetarian diet and consequently prized by, among others, pescetarians, weight lifters, wellness enthusiasts, and cheapskates. All of this gives them virtuous connotations and something of an air of abstemiousness. They can be an indulgent food, though, and are especially good when they’ve been soaking in butter and pureed garlic and parsley.

While these aren’t difficult to prepare, they do take a little work, which is the worst thing about them.

When you open this can, you see something unappetizing—silvery blobs suspended in congealed grease. To come to their maximum potential—expert tinned-seafood purveyor Dan of Rainbow Tomatoes Garden has an excellent post about this here—these need to be heated in the tin, because if you just scrape the contents out you’ll make a mess and risk breaking the fish up. I don’t see any reason you couldn’t use a toaster oven to do this, but I use a stovetop method.

First you take the lid off, to avoid any risk of the thing bursting; then put it in a small pan (I used a cast-iron one but anything is fine) over medium heat and fill the pan with water, up to a bit below the rim of the tin. Let it go for a minute or two, until the butter has melted, but there’s no need to let it sit; you’re just heating these, not cooking them.

Once the butter has melted and you’ve given it a second to heat, you come to the trickiest part of the operation. The metal in the tin will be too hot to touch directly, and the precious persillade in it will be on the verge of brimming over, so that you need to be very careful about transferring the whole thing onto a plate. I use tongs but you could probably do it with a knife. With the tin on a plate, dump the water in the sink and put the pan back on the heat to dry out; when it’s done, gently tip the tin into the pan, easing the sardines out with the edge of a fork but taking care not to break them in half by using too much force. (You want them to just slide out.)

Once they’re in the pan they just need a minute or two, depending on how you’d like them; remember again that you’re more gently warming them than frying them, unless you’d like to do that, in which case you should, because it’s probably good. Then they’re done.

These are exceptionally versatile in terms of what you can serve them with; the only real parameter is that you want something that will soak up the excess persillade when you pour it out of the pan. They’d go great on either firm dark lentils or burst red ones, on boiled new potatoes, on rice, on pasta finished in the pan and/or tomatoes and mushrooms sautéed in it, on a baked sweet potato, or in a bowl with hunks of warm, crusty bread. Earlier I had them on warm flatbread with big squeezes of lemon juice—these really soak up acid, and you should be sure to finish with something sharp; I’ve been thinking about a blackberry compote—and gave them a bit to let the butter really soak into the nooks and crannies. It was great.

These are very earthy and intense sardines and they may not be your favorite if you usually prefer firm and mild ones, though on the other hand they may be.

If you plotted the sardine- and peanut-related preferences of Americans on a quadrant chart, I’d be the dot all the way in the upper right-hand corner. I eat sardines two or three times a week, more than that more often than less, and not only do I have peanut butter in my oatmeal every morning and do things like drizzle it on ice cream, I actually usually weigh it on my kitchen scale because I’m so prone to serving myself five, er, servings. Despite—or perhaps because of—all this, I felt the true terror of the void when I read a recipe in Indignity (which I highly recommend) for “Virginia sandwiches” taken from a 1916 book called Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Recipes by Marion Harris Neil:

VIRGINIA SANDWICHES
1/2 pint (1 cup) shelled peanuts
2 cans sardines
Mayonnaise or boiled dressing
Buttered rye bread

Put the peanuts through a food-chopper and mix them thoroughly with the sardines, pounded to a paste; add sufficient dressing to hold together, and spread between slices of rye bread.

Cut in triangles and serve.

Among the questions raised for me by this recipe were why; what exactly “boiled dressing” is; what if anything about this is distinctively Virginian; what about the macronutrient profile of this dish would appeal to anyone, given that sardines have plenty of protein and fat on their own and so don’t need more of either; what about the flavor profile of this dish would appeal to anyone; why it doesn’t include spices or anything piquant or fresh or offering textural contrast; whether this is what life was like a century ago and if so whether I should consider more seriously than I do that the various grave problems of our day may be largely resolved a hundred years from now; why the butter; and, again, why. It may raise different questions for you. I had to try it.

The first problem posed here was that my wife, when I told her of my scheme, said things like “Absolutely not” and “That’s disgusting” and “Not in my house,” which I overcame by waiting until she had an errand to run. The second problem was that we don’t have a food-chopper; we do have a food processor but it’s big and I’d decided to halve the recipe and I didn’t think anything especially worthwhile would happen to a half cup of peanuts in it, so I used a mortar and pestle instead.

About 10 minutes of laborious smashing and grinding yielded about what I’d expect from a food-chopper. I drained a tin of Wild Planet sardines in water and dropped them in, then mashed it all into an unappealing, crumbly paste with a fork.

Here we came to my third problem: I don’t keep mayonnaise in the house because it’s revolting (the two circumstances in which I want it—if I’m having a cheeseburger and if I’m having pommes frites—do not occur in my house), and while once I learned what it was I decided it seemed far less revolting than the name made it sound, I still wasn’t going to make boiled dressing. Happily, I decided that my quest for authenticity here wouldn’t be too compromised by doing what I always do and substituting Greek yogurt for mayonnaise. (I used some from Fiddle Creek Dairy in Lancaster County, which is fantastic.)

It took about two heaping tablespoons to hold this together; you could definitely add more if you were inclined. (For me—someone who eats oatmeal with peanut butter every morning and frequently has lentils with sardines for lunch—this was already a bit much in the direction of viscous glop.) When I was done mashing it all up and putting about half the mixture on buttered rye bread from Lost Bread Co. it looked like this:

At about this point my wife returned unexpectedly. (I was slightly more embarrassed than I would have been to have been caught at the dining room table with hardcore pornography, but only slightly.) Nevertheless I forged on and tried the sandwich after cutting it, as per the recipe, into triangles:

Weirdly, this wasn’t bad! It certainly wasn’t good, but it definitely wasn’t bad. There was no cosmic horror in it; it just plain didn’t taste like anything. The peanuts and sardines somehow negated each other, so that it just tasted like fatty protein glop. Grinding the peanuts and vigorously mashing the sardines had even deprived it of any of the crunch the sardine’s bones and peanut chunks might have offered. The most flavorful element was the bread (which to be fair is very good bread). Two thoughts occurred to me: Perhaps the blandness was the point, with the peanuts’ negation of the strong sardine flavor being a way to allow Virginians who don’t like umami goodness to get all the nutritive value of the fish; and perhaps it would be good with some flavorful elements.

I didn’t have any pickled onions around, which were what I really wanted, but some chopped celery greens, salt and pepper, a tomato from my wife’s aunt’s garden, and some hot sauce went a hell of a long way. I still wouldn’t say this was good, but leaving the peanut-sardine mixture soaking in some lemon juice and cayenne for an hour before putting it on the buttered rye, swapping in some radish greens for the celery greens, and adding those pickled onions would probably get it close. I was left with the crucial question of why. (This was roughly 5,000 times the effort of a tuna fish sandwich and came with no attendant rewards; if I’m eating a sandwich with this many calories I don’t want it to taste like a shoe with a good tomato on it.) All I can leave you with is this.

Housekeeping

—Sometimes you stumble on a perfect thing:

For understandable reasons, columns, blogs, and newsletters about food largely focus on what to eat and how to prepare it. This Azerbaijani tin of skate in garlic is great, the writer writes. Have it gently nested in arugula. I enjoy reading things written in this line, and writing in it, but as I was eating some tinned fish the other day it occurred to me just how much it misses the where. Consider the hot dog: Prepared in my kitchen, it’s a bleak thing to eat, redolent of grim necessity, poor choices, and anxiously-awaited spousal judgment. The exact same one prepared the exact same way in a public park is a princely meal, all crisp snap and tender yielding; a much worse one steamed in a metal box at a baseball game is a kingly one. The difference is the where.

When I think about the tins I’ve enjoyed most, I don’t think about the ones that were objectively best, but about moments. I for instance vividly remember being the barely employed parent of a young child, very much counting every dollar, sitting in the dining room of a run-down Hyde Park apartment idly tapping my foot on a fixture under the table that had been put there so that the residents could summon a maid to bring in the next course, and enjoying some Bela-Olhão sardines with mustard and onion on a really good everything bagel. I was thinking about how nice it was to be able to have something excellent, even though I couldn’t afford extravagant things. The tin was irrelevant; as far as what I was eating went, I cared, as someone who grew up in New York, about having found a place in Chicago that made a really good bagel. What mattered was that at a moment when I was scared of the future, and more than that scared for my family, and more than that scared that I’d consigned them to a horrible future for doing nothing worse than being my family, I appreciated things—I was in a lovely if slightly shabby apartment in one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in America, with my beautiful family somewhere off in another room, enjoying a lunch that wouldn’t have been appreciably better if I’d had a hundred times more money to spend on it than I did.

Years later, I was sitting on a bench in French Creek State Park, 50 or so miles outside Philadelphia. My family and I were prospering and thriving, but I didn’t know the city—to which we’d moved to further prosper and thrive—or the region at all, and I was getting to know both by riding my bicycle everywhere, something that can be very frightening on unfamiliar rural roads, especially when the roads at times open out into big multilane roads fronting proto-exurban expansions. I had a Chicago-friendly single-speed bicycle at the time, loaded down with gear for an overnight camping trip and completely inadequately geared for some of the short, sharp, brutal hills at the very end of the trip. (I was also completely inadequately prepared, having lived in Chicago for so long, for any climb steeper than an overpass.) While some pearl couscous was cooking in a camping mug over a pocket stove, I chopped a shallot and a pepper, and dumped them and a tin of some kind of sardines in when the couscous was done. My thighs were shot from the climbs and, while I know this is not how things work, I could feel the protein going straight to them; it was as satisfying a meal as I’ve ever had, and at that precise moment, appreciating the varied topography of Eastern Pennsylvania and how easy the country was to get out to from the middle of the city relative to how easy it is from the middle of New York and Chicago, where I’d lived most of my life, I started to think things might work out okay for me, which they more than have.

I didn’t have any big epiphany this weekend, when I took the photo atop this newsletter on an island where I went camping with family. We set up a tent on the beach after seeing some wild horses and when it made sense, I took a book I’ve been working my way through forever out closer to the shore along with a tin of Bela-Olhão sardines and a box of Triscuits, and sat there reading the book and cutting chunks of the sardines out with a knife that means a lot to me because it used to belong to a family member who’s passed and heaping them, using the sharp end of the knife, on the crackers and enjoying the salty air and the fog and feeling, for the first time in a while, genuinely relaxed. I got up in the middle of the night and walked along the dunes and took this photo, which isn’t great but made me appreciate that the surveillance gadget I carry around with me can take a picture that does a functional job showing what I was seeing under nothing but moonlight, something many and perhaps most of the great photographers who have ever lived would have considered a miracle:

I increasingly think that min-maxing is a more operant and dominant metaphor for everything that’s horrifying about American life than most people realize. It comes from role-playing games, in the course of which you assign points to the various traits your character can have; if you play the game in a clever and efficient way you allocate the points such that the character is useless in areas you don’t care about and highly skilled in ones you do. (This can apply to things like cycling, where you can think about ratios of energy yield to weight even while just spinning out to a state park and end up eating weird science products that taste like car tires in the middle of and after your ride rather than just carrying and eating some food and enjoying it.) If you were to min-max tinned fish, you would get the maximum quality for the minimum payout, eating the best food the best way while spending the least on it, and you’d be missing the point, which really has nothing to do with what you’re eating. I have no idea what you have going on right now, but I hope you have time—or can make time—to get out to a beach, or a forest, or a quiet part of your place, and have a moment you just enjoy and appreciate.

Lately I’ve been vexed by poached eggs. For weeks, possibly months, a social-media site has been serving me “promoted”—i.e. paid-for—links to an engagingly written New York Times article potraying poaching eggs as a simple matter of dipping a half-dozen in boiling water for 20 seconds, removing them, then sequentially cracking them into a skillet (“spacing them apart as if on a sundial”), and serving them “like friendly ghosts” to a half-dozen friends on the spur of the moment.

Emphasizing the ease and inelegance of this method, the links I have been served every time I open the social-media site are accompanied by promotional copy reading, “They may not be hotel quality, but these batched poached eggs still make for a delicious breakfast sandwich filling.”

Times recipes and insistent advertisements for them, it seems to me, presume great dexterity and timing in egg-cracking as well as high standards for poached-egg quality—which, to be sure, Times readers and readers of Times advertisements presumably (mostly) have. I wrote as much on the social-media site, and subsequently the famous food writer Albert Burneko, aggrieved and incredulous that I’d called out the lies of the recipe writers who treat poaching an egg as a task as simple as caramelizing onions in 10 minutes, wrote and published—for the second time!—an (excellent) article outlining a simple method he proclaims can make even the most butter-fingered and many-thumbed among us poaching masters. (You should read the article, published at Defector, especially if you struggle with poaching eggs or are mystified by those who are.)

Feeling the gauntlet had been thrown, and wanting a poached egg on toast with sardines, I decided to make a poached egg on toast with sardines. The toast would be fine—I had a thick piece of sourdough that had been lurking in the pantry awaiting a fate as breadcrumbs. The key here, aside from Burneko’s method, would be the sardine.

At the time I made my choice I had six tins in my barren pantry. Two were from Conservas Güeyu Mar, maybe the best sardine tinners in the world. These have been difficult to come by due to supply-chain issues and I’m aging them, looking to pop the tins in perhaps 2025, so they were out. One was from Matiz, and one was from Bela-Olhão, both fine upper-mid-tier brands; both of these were in olive oil with piri-piri, which is supposed to add a bit of heat and spice but doesn’t really, though I keep buying the tins anyway. The other two tins were from Henry & Lisa’s and Wild Planet, highly respectable lower-mid-tier brands; they were packed in water, and in the pantry because a local tinned-fish enthusiast had briefly proclaimed they didn’t want any sardines packed in olive oil, before deciding this wasn’t even true at all and that they don’t even like sardines packed in water, because they’re bland.

The thing to do here really would have been to use one of the piri-piri tins and brush the sourdough with the oil from it before toasting it. For whatever reason, though, focused on poached eggs and aware of the high level of risk that a poorly-poached egg could ruin the whole thing—and entirely unwilling to consider non-sardine alternatives like mackerel or a pricy tin of garfish I impulsively bought and that has repulsed me ever since because my wife, on seeing that I’d bought it, told me family lore about how an ancestor, when he caught the unwanted fish along the Mississippi, used to shove them nose-down in the mud and move on—I put parameters on my calculations in a way that landed me on the tin I prized least: The Henry & Lisa’s, which isn’t a replacement-level tin overall but is a replacement-level among quality sardines.

As per Burneko’s instructions, I put two quarts of water and a tablespoon of vinegar (I was too lazy to look for the white vinegar so I used the cider vinegar I keep in arm’s reach of the stove) in the two-quart pot I use for boxed mac and cheese and the like, gently cracked an egg into a bowl, let the water boil and dropped the egg in. I set my toaster oven going and popped my tin. Disaster? The egg was all over the place, with part of the white wholly separated from the rest. I’d bought the demanded fresh eggs (at least I think I had; I’d bought the eggs the day before but who knows how long even hippie local eggs from the co-op have really been sitting there; I presume that the miracles of modern refrigeration mean anything I didn’t get directly from a farm may have a lifespan measured in years), but the pot was foaming.

Irritated, yet again, by the lies of the recipe writers, I fished the stray white out with a slotted spoon, turned the heat down, and dutifully waited out the rest of the four-minute timer I’d set, then scooped the egg out.

It could be that the faults I’d ascribed to the recipe writers were in fact down to my own laziness and ineptitude at the fundamental kitchen skill of egg cracking; that my poaching struggles have been about an inability, rooted in a desire for control, to accept that there is no precise right temperature, measured via meat thermometer, at which to poach your eggs, but that you should simply put them in mildly boiling water and let them cook, turning it down a bit if it seems to be bubbling too much; and that by calling them liars I’d defamed them. It could be that the moon is made of green cheese! We move on.

The yield was tremendous. With the egg sitting, I pulled the toast out and spread two of the sardines on it, then topped it all with scallions from the windowsill and, after the photo above was quickly taken, hot sauce. (The third sardine went to the dog, who had it stolen from him by the cats, who are generally disinterested in sardines—perhaps it was its having been in water rather than oil.) Once cracked and vigorously spread, the yolk jammed up with the sardines, offering its rich and luxuriant silkiness as a contrast to the gentle firmness of the fish and the yielding snap of the toast. I exulted. If only I’d used a higher-quality sardine! I will next time.

Housekeeping

—I hope everyone reading this is having a great spring! The phrase “touch grass,” however good it is as practical advice, is close to losing its charm as an internet-ism, but I dug some holes and planted some petunias today and boy did my general tension level go down.

—I highly recommend the new Freakons record, which you can listen to and buy on Bandcamp. As someone who has literally traveled to multiple foreign nations to see the Mekons and written a 10,000 word introductory guide to their records, I am very much the target audience for a collaboration between members of the Mekons and of Freakwater along with friends, but, my biases aside, this is a genuinely lovely record all about mining disasters, mining uprisings, and the life of the miner, and it contains one of my favorite versions of one of my favorite songs:

Tom Scocca, Indignity:

Discuss the aesthetic, please. 

Tim Marchman, Popping Tins: The thing people don't understand about the can of salmon you can get in any corner store in America is that it is high-quality fish, for most people the exact same fish fished from the exact same place as you'd get at a fishmonger who is laying out fillets of salmon on ice. When I was a teen we used to hear stories about guys who went out to Alaska to work on fishing boats and make enough money over a few weeks stint to go travel around the world for months, and one of my friends went out there and reported back that they were all true. One thing I learned from this is that most wild salmon you can get anywhere comes from those boats: They catch the fish and some of it goes into the cans and some is cut into fillets that you buy frozen wrapped in plastic and some is cut into fillets that are frozen and then thawed so that you'll buy them on ice at the store. They're all the same stuff; the questions are about money and presentation.

Indignity: And this, from a new load of groceries, is a dramatically new presentation. What do you make of Bumble Bee’s new approach here? What is it trying to tell the consumer of canned fish?

Popping Tins: First, I'm looking at the old label. Here I see the mountains and the cool water of Alaska. I can feel the crisp air into which the salmon is leaping. That, and the prominence of the words "Wild Alaska," tell me that Bumble Bee is telling the prospective purchaser that this is fresh fish with pink-orange flesh, not fish grown in a weird farm where parasites live on it and that has to be dyed because its cannibal diet has turned its flesh grey. 

I also note the emblazoned OMEGA-3 logo. I don't know what these oils do, exactly, but I do know they're understood to be good, especially for the brain, and that salmon has lots of them. Bumble Bee is communicating that this fish is good for you—that it's healthy and will contribute to your well-being. This is true; its wild-caught fish, packed pretty much straight from the water, are a healthy and economical choice. 

What I can't figure out is whether this would convince the prospective purchaser who's thought less about canned fish than I have, or come off as sweaty and try-hard. I don't want to balance my judgment of their packaging against the takes of a hypothetical and nonexistent consumer I haven't talked to. But I wonder if this label doesn't come off as deceptive, because people are so used to being lied to that packaging and presentation are assumed to be fraudulent, and so claims that you're selling a wholesome product convey that you're not doing so. How to convey that your claims are accurate when they're accurate is a fish-packaging problem I'm glad it's not my job to solve.

Indignity: So now they've stripped out all that natural landscape imagery for this minimalist and schematic new treatment: stamped-looking red fish, solid salmon-colored background, highly prominent "WILD caught" badge? Just the slightest drop shadow on the white lettering. I thought for a minute this was one of those times when a delivery outfit sends you a food-service package instead of the regular shelf-bound consumer version, but it seems to be real. What do you suppose the reasoning is behind the change?

Popping Tins: I can't speak to reasoning here, but the fundamental irreality of the packaging seems consonant with what it is in the can, and the consumers' relationship to it. I don't especially like the formulation where you say some old-timey thing was the original of some modern thing, but salmon boats are clear predecessors to modern ghost kitchens: The fish all gets caught and packaged in the same place and is just presented in different ways for different market segments. One kind of can is for the dollar store, another is for the boutique, even if it's the same product. 

What draws my attention here isn't so much the fonts as the change in color scheme. Previously, we had one heavy on green, which connotes ecological awareness and health. (I'd be interested to see if previous iterations of Bumble Bee canned salmon through the decades focused on green, or if they used other colors—blue, for example, to represent the clean waters in which these salmon lived.) Previously, we had one that emphasized the health of OMEGA-3 oils. Previously, we had one that pointed to the land, the air, and the water. 

Now we have a can that looks like the generic products in Repo Man, with a color scheme that represents the color of the fish's flesh—appetizing in reality, less so when presented as part of a can alongside a stylized fish. Note also that the new can emphasizes protein content over oils. This is presumably a nod to the fish-buyer who's attempting to live as a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer.

An important thing to note here is the blue badge on the new can, which I believe connotes that an authority of some sort has said that the fish has been responsibly caught and won't poison you. This move toward ecology and health being divorced from the imagery of cold water and crisp air is interesting from a marketing perspective.

Indignity: Does this graphic approach remind you of any other brands competing for newly enthusiastic canned-fish buyers?

Popping Tins: It seems to be approaching the austerity and reserve of a brand like Ekone, which offers nothing more than high-quality oysters in a can and has packaging reflecting that, without quite getting there.

Indignity: Yes, it reads maybe more like flat design, like a can of salmon that a circle-headed figure would be holding inside their cutaway apartment on a subway poster advertising some app. Given those associations, it can't help coming across as one more extremely late-arriving dose of Millennial Pink. Although when I look at the label again, in stronger lighting, I realize that the pink surface is not totally undifferentiated: it has faint wavy lines running through it in a visually subtle but incredibly literal representation of the grain of salmon flesh. 

It's very odd not to have the little Bumble Bee there. The old label was a bizarre hodgepodge of gradient shading and a fish that looked as if it were leaping out of a Wall Street Journal hedcut stipple illustration, but it all served to tell me that a giant corporation was on the job to deliver me exactly what I had come to expect from it.

I still do associate canned salmon with being the fancier and less regularly bought product than canned tuna, but mostly now it's a crucial piece of the standard household inventory. A single can with some combination of finely chopped celery, bell peppers, and/or scallions, plus a handful of chopped nuts, plus brown mustard and some mayo, and there's lunch for four people when I'm otherwise out of ideas.

Popping Tins: Now that you mention it, the Cronenbergian flesh-grain on the can is an odd touch. Is it meant to represent that the can itself is flesh, disgorging more? I'm confused.

I come back to my question about the original packaging: Does the accurate packaging, depicting healthy food caught in a pristine environment, signal to the purchaser that the food is in fact unhealthy and to be avoided? If so, the new, more generic packaging, by signaling that the food is mysterious and possibly part of some sort of Instagrammable setup, may signal that it's healthy and to be enjoyed. I like it less, but I can see it being effective. And I hope it is: the humble can of salmon really is one of the best deals anywhere in the supermarket, not only good for a really excellent salmon salad that's a nice change of pace from tuna salad, but also good for croquettes and stews and fillings in things like pies and empanadas. Whatever's on the can, it's in my pantry.

Potato chips don’t do much for me; I mainly think of them as a textural element for cheese sandwiches, a thing I have to acquire for my family when I tell them I’m going to the store and foolishly ask ask if they want anything, and a grease-producing agent that leaves me wondering if I should get up off the couch or just surreptitiously wipe my hands on my pants after I inevitably shove fistfuls down my gullet after I’ve acquired them for my family. This isn’t a principled stance; I’m just not enthusiastic about them (unless they’re legitimately horrifying ones made for the British market, in which case nothing can stop me from greedily devouring Marmite crisps or whatever while menacing my wife with the open end of the bag and claiming what’s in there is good).

The advice that writers of blog posts about how to enjoy tinned seafood often give to the effect that you should serve it alongside potato chips has consequently never done much for me; I’m aware that in Spain and Portugal and even here in Philadelphia, bars and living rooms where conservas are taken seriously see high-end items served alongside chips, but I’ve always met this with a shrug and sour thoughts about how I’ve seen bars I really like in Chicago and New York overrun by crazes for frozen tater tots and Hot Pockets. Recently, though, I was forced to reconsider when I saw this tweet from Dan Waber, proprietor of Rainbow Tomatoes Garden, often touted here as as the best place to get canned seafood:

“That looks incredibly good, and I have tins of seafood,” I thought. “Also, I have one of those milk-frothing gadgets—well, I don’t, but my son does because I bought him one … but surely I could use it and then thoroughly clean it, and he would be none the wiser … he only has it because I bought it for him … I have to clean up after his messes all the time anyway, this is no different than any other time I clean some soiled item and then put it back ready to use …”

I thought along these lines for several days, going back and forth between wanting emulsified tinned-seafood oil and being worried that if I explained to my son that I wanted to put him in a position to have possibly mussel-tainted milk in his coffee, he might deny me access to the gadget. Last night—seized, after having eaten multiple plates of meat and starch at an Amish-country smorgasbord for lunch, with a simply overwhelming desire to have a light, salty snack for dinner after my son came back with his mother from a grocery-shopping excursion that yielded potato chips and a nice bottle of chardonnay—I grabbed a tin of Matiz octopus in olive oil (a classic, not that expensive and widely-available brand carried at Whole Foods), poured the oil into a cup, emulsified it using my son’s milk frother, thoroughly cleaned the frother using soap and boiling water, then poured the oil over the octopus parts and dumped a fistful of the chips alongside it, as seen in the image atop here.

(My son, I will note, is fine with the since-revealed unauthorized use of his gadget, since it was cleansed. Had he not been I would have bought him a new one.)

Potato chips are now doing something for me; scooping up octopus parts soaked in whipped octopus-steeped oil are actually a perfect use case for them, I’d say, between the saltiness, the textural contrast between the crisp chips and the chewy octopus, the way the chips can be used as utensils, and the way the chips are slightly softened without losing their snap by being soaked in the bright liquid. I would absolutely order this in a bar or serve it to someone I wanted to impress at my house; it turns out, as is not unusual, that the conventional wisdom is correct and that chips and tinned seafood go together. I’m now just thinking about all the potential uses for frother-beaten tinned-seafood oil—it gets very creamy and feels very fancy to be enjoying, an ideal use for something that might be treated as garbage to be tossed out.

Housekeeping

—Tomorrow, Popping Tins—which can be emailed at tlmarchman@gmail.com—will be co-publishing an item with a newsletter written by one of my favorite writers and people. Keep an eye out!

—I assume most people reading this newsletter, like most people everywhere, appreciate just how great Squeeze was, but always worth taking a bit of time out to appreciate them. What an utterly fantastic band:

It isn’t really fall yet in Philadelphia; most of the trees are green, and it’s usually shorts weather. On a good night, it’s just chilly enough for sitting by an open window with a wool sweater on to be comfortable. Nothing much is crunching underfoot.

This is the ideal time of year for soup. Maybe not all soups—it’s not exactly the right time for a Dutch oven full of vegetables to simmer away for hours while things go into the oven and come out baked—but definitely for simple ones, the sort that clear your head and make you want to take a long walk.

The one I’ve liked best recently is a quick one full of pantry items; I make it for two but it’s very easy to double it. I like it, a local tinned-fish enthusiast also likes it, it’s easily doubled or halved, and it’s an answer to the question I get most often, which is, “What do I do with the oil?”

There are a lot of answers to this. I’ve been trying to find a fantastic video I once saw of a chef at Güeyu Mar—the restaurant associated with Conservas Brasadas Güeyu Mar, which makes some of the best cans of seafood in the world—plating some sardine loins from a can. He treated the oil, which he artfully poured over the fish with the edge of a spoon, like what people call it—liquid gold. If you get a really good can, you can just pour some in a little bowl and dunk warm bread in it, or dress salads with it, or lightly fry the contents in it. I like to make soup with it.

To do this, put a pot—I use a deep two-quart sauté pan, the second-most useful of all pots, but whatever is fine—over medium heat, then dice about a little under a half pound of vegetables. The last time I made this I used two stalks of celery, a small red onion, and two seeded jalapeños, but you could use bell peppers, or hotter peppers, or leeks, or thinly-sliced carrots, or whatever you have around.

Once the vegetables are chopped, bring the heat down a bit and open two four-ish ounce tins of seafood in olive oil. (The last time I made this I popped a Conservas de Cambados Octopus in Olive Oil—these are fantastic and I highly recommend them!—and some Henry and Lisa sardines I got at Whole Foods, but you can use pretty much anything, as long as it’s packed in oil; mussels and trout really shine here. Personally I like to use ones that are packed in plain oil, but there are all sorts of cans with really intense flavors that would work great.) Drain the oil into the pot, let it warm up, and then toss in your vegetables and coat them evenly in the oil. You’ll want to give these five to seven minutes, stirring every so often and chopping a couple of cloves of garlic and throwing them and some herbs and spices in toward the end. (I like a lot of black pepper, some thyme, a bay leaf, and a dried chipotle, but whatever you like will work; you might want to hold off on the salt for now as the tins have plenty.)

Once everything is nice and soft, add in a 14.5 ounce can of diced tomatoes and another can’s worth of liquid. (This can be anything. The last time I made this I used some cold brew kombu dashi I had in the fridge but any kind of lightish stock is good, as as is beer, as is wine, as would be wine and water or water and lemon juice.) Stir everything around, turn the heat back up to medium, and leave it alone for 15 or so minutes with the lid off, just checking in once in a while to make sure it’s not coming above a simmer. At this point, crush the tomatoes up with a potato masher or whatever you have, add in your seafood—you probably want to break any big trout or sardine fillets up—and let it go another few minutes with the heat down. Once everything seems to be the right consistency, add some lightly chopped parsley and serve it in bowls over some rice or with some crusty bread for dipping.

As people all over the world have long known, the oil in a quality tin is precious; whatever you do with it, don’t waste it!

Housekeeping

I hope you’re having a great fall! If you’re in Philadelphia, note that the Bottle Shop at 44th and Spruce—which has as good a selection of beer and wine as there is in the city—has a small but absolutely fantastic selection of tins, and fancy crackers to go with them. Drop a line to poppingtins@substack.com, feel free to forward or share or subscribe or what have you, and please enjoy Thelonious Monk’s 1964 rendition of “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)”:

It was too hot to eat for weeks. I went through quarts of iced tea a day—four bags of English breakfast tea in a two-quart pitcher will get you good tea after a couple of hours in the fridge, and you can leave them in overnight just fine—and didn’t have an appetite for too much else. Ripe, juicy peaches and blueberries looked just too heavy sitting in their bowls; tomatoes were globes of acid. I was about as likely to boil water in a pot or light a fire in the grill for some corn as I was to stick my hand in them once they were going.

The thing I enjoyed most this summer, apart from some peaches and blueberries in yogurt on a day that was less suffocating than usual, was seafood. At a picnic table in Dutchess County, New York, I cut up a thick tomato and a garden cucumber from the Clark Park Farmers Market into a steel box, slid two trout fillets in, drizzled them with a bit of oil from the tin, and sprayed them with lemon. It was essentially perfect.

The trout, a gift from a friend, was as good as it gets, smoky and succulent, firm but yielding. What I know about it is that it’s fantastic and that the company that makes it, Portugal’s JOSÉ Gourmet, has some of the most spectacular promotional copy in an industry that does not lack for spectacular promotional copy, describing both its philosophy (“We are not producers … We do not compete with competitors, whoever they are”) and its smoked trout in olive oil, specifically:

Imagine the trout’s /habitat/, the purity of the crystalline water, its richness in oxygen. Imagine the best smokehouse, sharpened by handcraft tradition and guaranteed by technological means. Imagine the delicious olive oil coming into play to complete a spectacular combination. Imagine and keep on imagining, until the you have the opportunity to try it out!

The rain and the sun challenged each other eternally. She prepared her nest of clouds and covered his solar rays. He warmed up the water mirrors, sometimes making them evaporate till the last drop. Tired of all the competition that filled him up and drained it without even asking his opinion, the river tried to get them to reconcile. He declared a tie and gave them an award: the rainbow trout.

(Bolding and mystifying virgule usage as per the original.)

I keep a lot of cans of seafood in my pantry, and the ones I reached for when it was hot were the ones that could inspire something this over the top. These tended, for whatever reason, to not be fish. Sardines, salmon, mackerel, trout, and tuna aren’t that heavy, as things go, but in the middle of one of the various heat waves afflicting Philadelphia, they definitely didn’t not seem like the sort of thing I’d have to choke down in a grim effort to make the little pie chart on MyFitnessPal fill out in an anxiety-reducing way. Oysters, mussels, and, cockles, though, just as Arya Stark (more or less) told everyone in Braavos, have been the way to go.

For oysters, I was really liking Ekone’s plain smoked oysters, which lack spectacular promotional copy but are absolutely fantastic atop a Triscuit with a splash of hot sauce and go really great on some crusty bread with tomato slices. As opposed to the dubious mass-market oysters this newsletter has previously covered and expressed satisfaction over with reservations, these are big, meaty boys—they go fantastic atop a Triscuit because they are the size of a Triscuit—that have a great texture to them, and, if not all the fresh liveliness of a living oyster, a lot of the essence of the living sea. The problem with them, if there is one, is salt. They have a lot of salt—49% of your daily needs, per the Ekone site. That’s of course a lot of why they’re so good and it’s not something you can’t fit into things if you’re inclined. I definitely managed to do so.

Mussels-wise, I’m addicted to Patagonia’s various mussels, which have previously been touted here. I don’t want to be, because the sea life sold by a globe-spanning fleece-vest concern that works with Jeff Bezos’ labor-violations operation isn’t, on a basic level, what I want to be affiliated with, and yet … they’re really good, readily available not just at Whole Foods but at my corner store (where I in fact saw an area man busted for trying to smuggle some out in his tight running shorts), and fairly cheap. I don’t know that there’s anything in a tin so versatile as their mussels in sofrito and their smoked mussels. If you make a plain salad, you can dump the contents of a can on top, hit it with a little bit of acid, and you have a meal. If you have some leftover rice or pasta you don’t know quite what to do with, you can dump the contents of a can on top, let the starch soak up the sauce, and you have a meal. They go as well with some toast as anything else you might get out of a can. They’re fantastic in soups (a topic to be touched on in future as I cosplay as His Excellency, the Duke of Fall.) They’re also downright pretty, outright enlivening a boring pile of kale and cucumbers and green onions and tomatoes. I just love them.

As far as cockles go, I will be honest and admit I’m not entirely clear on what a cockle is. Basic online research has of course enlightened me (I’m aware it’s a bivalve that is apparently capable of jumping, which I find questionable) but I just don’t have the kind of familiarity with it that I do with various other creatures you come to know by growing up in the Mid-Atlantic and eating them. This lack of familiarity, though, led to Dan of Rainbow Tomatoes Garden—often touted here as the place to go for tinned seafood due to its vast selection and general niceness—providing me with (full disclosure) Portomar’s cockles in brine for review, which led to the best non-trout gustatory experience of the summer for me when I just had them over some white rice with parsley and a salad. However heavy any fish can be, these are the opposite, so light they float up into the stars, a downright delicate experience that makes mussels and oysters and clams seem like lead. If lemon juice was tinned seafood it would be this—bright and refreshing. I don’t think there are any cheap ones, but you have to try these, they’re worth the money.

The other best tinned seafood experiences I’ve had in the long while since I last sent out one of these newsletters involved Scout’s tinned lobster and these French sardines in garlic, butter, and parsley sauce, which you need to warm and then fry and are fantastic. They do not fit in with the general theme here, though, so I will get to them another time.

Tins or cans?

If I’m being honest, one reason I haven’t sent this newsletter out in a while is the mild backlash against the term “tinned seafood,” which some people, including ones I like and respect, find precious and annoying (twee, even), and use of which which quantifiably seems to have peaked around the time right around the time Popping Tins started going out, at one point actually overtaking “canned seafood.”

I can understand finding the phrase “tinned seafood” precious and/or annoying and/or twee and/or unwontedly possibly Anglophilic—I certainly find the phrase “bone broth” annoying—which is why I’ve used tin and can interchangeably here. That said, the people who have been tinning and/or canning excellent seafood and promoting excellent tinned/canned seafood as an excellent thing to eat for the last while have been using the word “tinned,” I think, not out of the bad motives that lead to outright scammers calling stock bone broth, but for the good reason that the phrase “canned” has bad associations and connotations, in this context, that call to mind cat food, and so a little rebranding is perfectly warranted in service of making people a little more open-minded about the joys and satisfaction of eating sea life, fancy or not, from metal containers. I’ll bear in mind that the word “tinned” may be a little much if everyone else bears in mind that who fucking cares, and that cockles are a great thing to try.

Lately, I’ve been watching what I eat, which is pretty unusual for me; for most of my life I’ve been alarmingly skinny, and unable to gain weight even when I wanted to. When I got a scale recently to check in on just how much a spare tire I’d picked up since last March, though, I learned that I’m not only bigger than I’d ever thought I’d be, but bigger than I would have thought possible. (Getting older, not leaving your house for a year, and stress-eating and drinking more than you really should adds up, who knew.) I’m not worried about my weight as such—I could be healthy at 140 or 200 pounds, depending on what I was eating and what I was doing exercise-wise—but given that I have a tendency to high blood pressure and was generally really feeling like shit before the gym opened back up, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to consciously remind myself that as well as biscuits and gravy goes with eggs, asparagus with a little olive oil and lemon juice goes pretty well too.

Over the course of the pandemic, one key bad habit I developed was going to Fu-Wah—among other things, all of them good, Cedar Park’s premier sandwich maker—to get massive Italian hoagies dripping with oil and mayo for lunch. It got me out of the house for a bit in the middle of the day, gave me a pretext to spend some time in the park, and eating something like 1000 calories of salt, fat, and carbs released enjoyable chemicals in my brain. As part of my eating-watching, I’ve tried to analyze what I was getting out of worse habits like this so I can swap them out for better ones. Going to the gym or for a bike ride daily is a good way to make sure I’m getting out every day; reading in the park is a good pretext for going to the park for some alone time; and a tuna melt is a great way to eat salt, fat, and carbs and enjoy the consequent release of chemicals in my brain while having a lunch more reasonable than a full-on hoagie.

Tuna melts are true lazy-person food. I take a can of decent supermarket tuna—Wild Planet or Genova brand, say—and smash it up with two and a half tablespoons of Greek yogurt, two chopped green onions, and a heaping half-teaspoon of Old Bay while heating up a big cast iron pan over medium heat for five minutes. Then I take four slices of good bread and brush a bit of butter on one side of each of them and a bit of mustard on the other of two of them, then put a slice of cheddar on each mustard side, put the slices with cheddar on the pan, scoop half the tuna mixture onto each, put on some hot sauce and some pickled onion, cover with the other slices of bread, flip after a couple of minutes once they seem nice and charred and melty, then plate each one alongside a really big pile of vegetables and give one to my kid and wolf the other one myself. It’s a good compromise, in all: This isn’t health food, exactly, but it definitely has its virtues, and there’s certainly nothing particularly deathly about it, even as it’s delicious and hugely satisfying and generally scratches the same itch a cheeseburger from a diner would.

The best tuna melt I’ve made lately came with tuna from Fishwife, a new tinned-seafood concern about which I’ve had some slight hesitations. That’s partly because of how much coverage it’s gotten—the New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, for instance, have all run flattering stories, while New York had one of its proprietors, a well-known comedian, write a (useful!) guide to things that can make your tinned-seafood eating experience better—and mostly because it’s a direct-to-consumer brand.

I don’t inherently have anything against such brands, but I am skeptical of them. Good ones—there’s a shoe company I could recommend—offer a quality product and a credible explanation of what exactly their deal is. These are rare. Most just pick generic stuff out of catalogues, handwave about cutting out the middleman, and put a lot of effort into associating whatever they’re selling with pleasant imagery and a compelling Brand Story. (Not quite the same thing, but if you want to catch up on a tinned seafood scandal, I highly recommend this excellent article by Janelle Bitker of the San Francisco Chronicle, about a guy who claimed to be raising artisanal sturgeon in Northern California that was a key ingredient in $300-a-plate dishes at fancy restaurants but was in fact just buying generic stuff and relabeling it.)

Fishwife is definitely associated with pleasant imagery and a compelling Brand Story. Its brightly-colored Instagram and website and the lovely boxes in which its tins are packaged and stickers with which they come (one of which is now on my bicycle) cast tinned seafood as a modern and downright sexy thing to eat. The company’s very name—an archaic misogynist insult, repurposed—hints at its story, which involves two women, trapped at home, eating a lot of tinned seafood during the pandemic. As Vogue put it:

The way co-founders Caroline Goldfarb, a TV-comedy writer and co-host of the Glowing Up podcast, and Becca Millstein, an artist community manager at The Rattle Collective, see it, if ever there was a time to embrace tinned seafood, it's now. The idea for Fishwife was born in quarantine, after all.

While in lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, Goldfarb and Millstein were preparing all their food at home; tinned fish became a pillar for many of their best-loved snacks and meals, from sardines on crusty buttered toast and salads to linguine with mussels in an anchovy tomato sauce. One day in May, it occurred to them there was a gap in the American market for affordable, sustainably-caught, and well-branded tinned fish.

Fishwife isn’t particularly affordable—it’s not wildly unaffordable, either, but at $8 per, its tins cost about what high-quality tins cost—and there isn’t really a lack of sustainably-caught tinned seafood on the market. On the branding point, though, the two were absolutely right about gaps in the market. There are cynical and not-cynical ways one could read this, but which is more correct depends on what’s in the tins. So, curious, I ordered three cans of smoked rainbow trout and three of smoked albacore tuna, and happily discovered that there is absolutely no reason to be cynical whatever.

Fishwife’s tuna—“hook-and-line caught in the Northwest Pacific by small boat fishermen,” it asserts—is fantastic, firm and moist and subtly smoked. Within two days of their arrival, three tins were consumed as part of a tuna melt (delicious), as part of a late-night pantry raid carried out by a local tinned-seafood enthusiast (not me, so I can’t say), and on a bagel with cream cheese (again, not by me, so I can’t say, but it looked great). I’d have it on rice with sesame seeds and green onions, flaked over a salad, or pretty much any other way you might might want to have a good piece of tuna. (As wonderful as my tuna melt was, actually, I think that might be the least-good reasonable way to have this—it’s a substantial piece of fish, more akin to something off the grill than to the easily-yielding mass you get in even a good supermarket can, and something that would more than hold up against but not overpower a salad the way a good oil-packed jarred tuna might.)

The trout—“raised in pure Idaho spring water” and “fed a sustainable, nutrient-rich diet”—was even better. I had it on toast and in a three-egg omelette; a local tinned-seafood enthusiast had it on a bagel with cream cheese and wanted more, desperately, leading to a six-tin order. This is a richer and smokier fish than the tuna, and far flakier; it would, again, be ideal for a salad, but I’d definitely recommend it in an omelette or a quick broiler frittata, or even straight from the tin or on crackers. Like the tuna it was packed in just enough liquid to keep it moist, with no excess, which would make it useful in applications where seafood submerged in oil might not be ideal. In the best way, it tastes like eating by a campfire; with my first bite, I was wondering whether I’d ever had trout and fried eggs cooked over an open flame, or was just summoning up some memory from Twain. (It was the latter, which doesn’t seem to matter so much.)

Fishwife is sourcing excellent tinned seafood—a product generally associated with grim Andy Capp types who might otherwise be eating pickled eggs, and to a far lesser extent with foodies talking inaccessibly about their delightful trips to obscure Western European markets—and selling it at a fair price in a way that can appeal to everyone but maybe especially people who might not have the best associations with fish in a can, and maybe especially young women. I’m generally pretty cynical about branding exercises, but evangelizing for tinned seafood by doing something more than shipping plain blue cans to obscure specialty grocers, while selling a product every bit as good as what’s in those cans, strikes me as a fantastic idea. In a Nylon story about the rise of tinned seafood this week, in which I was unaccountably quoted, one of the founders was quoted as such:

“Tinned fish is the ultimate hot girl food,” says Goldfarb. “There is no food that will make you hotter than tinned fish. Straight up.”

I hope they make a billion dollars.

In other tinned seafood news

—A colleague, on reading that I had rhapsodized about the apolitical nature of tinned seafood in Nylon, pointed out the ties between the U.S. tuna-fishing industry and the internment of Japanese citizens, which is a fascinating topic I’ve been reading about and will be writing about here at some point. Something being apolitical in the sense I meant—not reminding you of Matt Gaetz’s dumb face, say—doesn’t mean it isn’t tied up with all sorts of things that are profoundly political, including history and climate science and labor issues. (For all the hype about the glamor and sustainability of tinned seafood, I’m not sure many people reading this would like to work in a factory canning sardines.) These are topics that will be covered here in the future.

—Because I live in a house where only half the members eat seafood, I haven’t used anchovies in pasta sauce in forever, but recently a local tinned-seafood enthusiast obtained some Roland anchovies at the store and asked me to use them, so while finishing this newsletter off I made a giant vat of sauce (this recipe basically) and was reminded how incredibly good they are in sauce—everything you’d want from a meat sauce with rigatoni without having any meat in it.

—I enjoyed flawless sardines today for lunch—La Brújula’s sardines sized 3/4 to a tin, which you can get from Rainbow Tomatoes Garden. They’re not quite as world-destroying as Güeyu Mar’s chargrilled sardine loins, but they’re more easily obtained and notably cheaper, and I cannot imagine the basic workaday sardine being done any better, and they come in a light oil that was amazing over a bunch of asparagus.

—Reader “Drew M.” has been wondering how you open tins without getting oil all over the fucking place. There are three answers. One is to buy newfangled tins like the ones King Oscar and Season are using, which instead of a pull tab have a thin sheet of tin foil on top that’s much more easily pulled back. A second, more realistic one is to accept that popping a tin is going to involve getting some oil all over and plan accordingly. I open mine over a plate on my worktable or in the sink, and make sure not to wear any shirt I couldn’t live with having an oil stain on while popping. A third, seemingly the plan of a local tinned-fish enthusiast of my acquaintance, is to just pop the tins right there on the counter, consume them, and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.

—I’m just a lurker, not a participant in the community, but the Canned Seafood subreddit is really great and I’d recommend checking it out if you haven’t. It seems to entirely consist of people politely and usefully discussing this subject.

—In the last issue, I stupidly blamed the difference in cholesterol between two oyster brands on the oils they were packed in; cholesterol is of course not found in plant foods. I regret the error.