Guides

Spend any time online looking for advice on how to eat tinned fish and you will come away believing the answer is a cracker, or even worse, a saltine. A piece of fish laid across a crisp round, photographed from above, is the image the whole internet has settled on. Ask why, and the people doing it will tell you the bare cracker lets them taste the fish itself, clean and unadorned, the full flavor of the thing. You would assume they are right, as most people do. This is the wrong answer, and it is worth understanding why, because getting this one thing right is most of what separates a good tin eaten well from a good tin wasted.

Start with what is in the tin. A wild animal that grew in open water, lived a life while evading predators, and was caught at the right season. It was then cleaned, cooked, and packed by hand by someone who took it seriously. A great tin is the end of a long chain of care and a cracker is a poor place for all that to end up. Crackers add nothing to carry the oil, create no contrast, no substance. It's just a forkful of plain fish on a dry shard, with none of the balance that makes this type of food make sense. A cracker is perfect for pâté, rillettes, mousse, tapenade, or caviar, things that are soft, spreadable, and need a firm dry base, but not tinned fish. The flavor of a good tin is not only in the fish; it is in the oil or the sauce around it, which has been quietly working on that fish for months or years, drawing flavor out and feeding it back in. By the time you open the tin, the best of it is in that liquid.

While any type of tin can be eaten in the following way, this guide will focus on sardines because there are more sizes, more preparations, and more range than anything else in the tin. From plain in olive oil to tomato, escabeche, piri-piri, or butter. Learn to eat a sardine well and you can eat almost anything in the aisle. The answer you've been looking for, the thing the cracker fails to be, is bread. Specifically, a baguette.

This is worth being clear about: bread is not a beginner's trick you graduate out of. This is the one move whether it is your first or your five-hundredth, the simplest, most portable, most complete way to eat almost anything that comes in a tin. Everything else, the preparations, the pairings, the recipes, branches off this. Get the bread right and you have the whole thing; the rest is just variation.

Why the baguette

There is a reason the French built a civilization around it, and a reason you can find a baguette in nearly any supermarket on earth, usually for a couple of dollars. It is the most useful bread there is and also one of the cheapest. The crust gives structure, the crumb soaks up oil and sauce, and the flavor is neutral enough to let the fish lead while still being a real, substantial mouthful. It turns a tin from a mere snack into a meal, and it travels: a baguette and a tin is a lunch you can eat literally anywhere, which is close to how this food was eaten in Europe long before it became a trend. Crusty bread is ancient; the baguette is its most portable, most affordable, and most perfect modern form. Take a boat down the Seine toward sunset and you will see people strung all along the banks, couples, families, and friends sitting on the stone with a baguette, a bottle of wine, and a few things to pick at between them. In Galicia and Portugal it is the same, the tin set down among the cheese and the olives and the cured meat, the bread within reach. The fish is the guest of honor; the bread is simply always there.

Americans tend to misuse the baguette. The instinct is to slice into thin rounds, little medallions, which turns it right back into a cracker: small, rigid, no give. That is not what a baguette is for. Use it the way it is meant to be used:

• Torn into chunks, not sliced. Tear off chunks in wide pieces. A torn piece has a soft face that grabs oil and a crust that will hold together. It is built for dipping into the tin and layering fish on top.
• Split lengthwise. Cut a section in half the long way and you have a vessel: a long open face to load with fish, or the makings of a sandwich. This is the single most useful move with a tin.

Break it up, do not keep it intact

Here is the technique almost every online photo gets wrong. People lay the whole intact piece on top of the bread or cracker, proud of how it looks, and miss the point entirely.

The intact fish in the tin is there for one reason: so you can see it is a quality piece, whole, properly packed, cared for. That is its job in the tin, and it is worth a moment of appreciation. But it does not mean it has to stay intact on the way to your mouth. Once you have looked at it, lightly break up the fish into its own oil or sauce, right there in the tin, and use the mashed result as a spread. Now everything in the tin, the oil, the soft bits, the sauce, goes onto the bread together, instead of being left behind in the can. A mashed, layered, oil-soaked piece of baguette is a completely different and better thing than a stiff fish piece balanced on a thin cracker.

When you finish, tear a plain piece and mop up whatever is left in the tin. Nothing in there is meant to be discarded.

Warm the tin first

If you are at home or able to, this is the single best thing you can do to a tin, and almost nobody does it. Drop the unopened tin in a bowl of hot tap water for at least five minutes before you open it, while you warm a baguette section. The difference is not at all subtle. Cold tin from the shelf means the oil is thick, a little dull and the fish is firm; the flavors stay locked up. Warmed through then the oil loosens and turns silky, the fat in the fish softens. A tin that you thought was good at room temp can be remarkably elevated when warmed. Same tin, same fish, just completely woken up.

This is not only for oil-packed tins. The sauced ones can benefit even more. A warmed tin of sardine in tomato, escabeche, or a spiced sauce like tikka masala or piri-piri, the sauce comes alive the same way it would in a pan. It stops tasting like something in a can and starts tasting like a just prepared, cooked meal.

Hot tap water in a bowl is enough; you are warming it through, not cooking it, so there is no stove and nothing to clean. If you are out, at a desk, on a picnic, with a baguette and a tin in a bag, room temperature is completely fine and always has been. This is a do-it-if-you-can elevation move, not a rule. But if you are standing in your own kitchen, take the five minutes. It is the cheapest upgrade in the category.

Two ways to do it

For tins in sauce, bread is enough. A tin in tomato, escabeche, or a spiced sauce already brings its own seasoning. Warm it if you can, split the baguette, break up the fish into the sauce, pile the mash on, and tear more bread to chase the liquid at the bottom. Nothing else needed.

For tins in oil, step it up with pan con tomate. This is the Spanish move, and it is the best entry point there is. Split a length of baguette, drizzle it with olive oil, spread grated fresh tomato across it, add a little salt. Then layer the sardines, lightly broken up on top of that tomato bed. The tomato brings acidity and moisture, the oil ties it together, and a simple tin of sardines in olive oil becomes something you would order in a bar in San Sebastián, no passport required. Warm the tin first and it is even better still.

About the boards

The other popular way to serve tinned fish is the spread: a tin set out with piles of cheese, pickles, mustard, cornichons, chips, every accompaniment, arranged on a board. There is nothing wrong with a board, but the photogenic ones almost always leave out the one thing that actually makes it a meal. The bread. A French or Spanish table will improvise the cheese, the olives, whatever is around, but the bread and the wine are never optional, because those are the meal and everything else is a guest of honor.

Where to go next

The bread is like the trunk of a tree, everything else branches off it. How to enjoy a fish-first tin goes preparation by preparation: oil, smoke, escabeche, tomato, butter, shellfish, octopus. What each fish is actually for walks the species one at a time. The starter pantry is six tins worth buying first. And the two worlds of tinned fish makes sure you always know whether you are holding an ingredient can or a tin worth this kind of attention.