Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [163]
The third category is the fine French sardine from Brittany and the Atlantic coast, down as far as Royan at the mouth of the Gironde. This is the famous frisky sardine celebrated by Desnos in one of his nonsense poems:
Une sardine de Royan
Nageait dans l’eau de la Gironde.
Le ciel est grand, la terre est ronde,
J’irai me baigner à Royan.
Avec la sardine,
Avec la Gironde,
Vive la marine!
Et salut au monde!
Since the sardine is seasonal, arriving in incalculable quantities, the problem was, in the past, preservation of the catch. Salting in barrels was the usual answer, but – or so the story goes – a Mademoiselle Le Guillou of Lorient had the idea of frying them in olive oil, then putting them up in jars filled with fresh oil to keep out the air. A fellow citizen, Monsieur Brancart, began commercial production. In her famous Spectator article on sardines, reprinted in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, Elizabeth David describes the clay oules that held them and goes far more deeply into the early and continuing history than I can here.
This happened at the start of the nineteenth century when Nicolas Appert, who as distiller and confectioner had been much occupied with preservation, set up a factory for bottling food at Massy, near Paris. The advances were made when he tackled the problem of feeding the Navy, and people making sea journeys. His products were sent to Brest to be kept at sea for several months: when the bottles were opened in April, 1807, the partridges and peas and other meats were in a good edible condition. Appert published his methods in 1810.
The next substantial progress was made by an Englishman, Bryan Donkin, who saw the weak point of Appert’s method – the breakable jars – and adapted it to tin-plated cans. The British Navy was as impressed as the French had been. So were the better-off travellers who could afford to eat canned rather than salted meat on board ship. In 1824 William Parry took canned beef, veal, soup and vegetables on his expedition to discover the North-West Passage – and a confectioner of Nantes, Joseph Colin, began to can sardines. They were of course a luxury – unlike the canned Pacific salmon that was produced forty years later when such goods were becoming a godsend to the mass market of growing industrial towns, and America was getting the blame for exploiting what was after all an English invention. What is surprising is the way old attitudes survive – bottled fruit and vegetables are still reckoned superior to canned and a tin of salmon is still the treat for Sunday tea in many thousands of families in Britain.
In France you will find a much wider choice in the quality of canned sardines than in any other country. Check the small print. You can see from the label that sardines in olive oil à l’ancienne are something special. Category 1, ‘Extra’, are worth going for, too, as this means the sardines used were all fresh and matched for size. Once frozen fish enters into a product (category 2, ‘Choice’, includes frozen as well as fresh sardines) there is inevitably a deterioration as there has been so sadly in Lancashire potted shrimps. The best Breton sardine is slightly smaller than the Portuguese. It has been brined, beheaded and gutted, rinsed in seawater, and dried in currents of warm air. It is then lightly cooked in olive oil before being packed in fresh olive oil with aromatics. The quality of the French product depends, too, on coolness – on the coolness of the waters from which the fish are caught, on the coolness of the climate of Nantes, Douarnenez and Concarneau where they are processed. For these considerations, you must expect to pay a little more.
You can do a number of things with canned sardines, but none of the recipes that involves heating them is to be recommended. There is always another fish – herring or anchovy – which would