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Calcium in a Can: Appreciating Sardines
| Article
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22204 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 2002 |
2,362 Words |
| Author
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Claire Hopley
Claire Hopley lives in Massachusetts and is the author of the
newly published New England Cooking: Seasons and Celebrations
(Berkshire House), featuring recipes from four centuries of
the region's cuisine. She last wrote for The: World & I about
heirloom tomatoes. |
In today's kitchen, sardines often play a minor role, but they deserve the limelight. The Romans knew this over two millennia ago, when they preserved some of their summer catch of sardines in oil or salt. In Brittany, too, fishermen's families developed a tradition of preserving sardines in oil or butter in jars called oules. Not surprisingly, then, it was a Breton, Joseph Colin of Nantes, who produced the first canned sardines in 1824, using the latest technology. Earlier in the nineteenth century Napoleon's government had offered twelve thousand francs to anyone who invented a way to preserve food. Nicolas Appert won it in 1810 after explaining his method of sealing food in bottles and sterilizing them by boiling. Many entrepreneurs immediately took advantage of Appert's discovery, but Colin was the first to apply it to fish.
Napoleon had been interested in food preservation because he needed to feed his armies, but the significance of canning did not fade when he was defeated in 1815. France and other European countries had far-flung empires staffed by people who longed for the foods of home. Canning made them available, and canned sardines became colonial staples. In A Passage to India, E.M. Forster describes a typical Anglo-Indian menu as "julienne soup full of bulletty bottled peas ... more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines on toast." Recalling her 1940s childhood in India, author Jennifer Brennan cites a recipe for curried sardines in puff pastry as "very convenient ... because we always had sardines in the store cupboard."
By this time, other countries had joined France in the sardine-canning business. America was one of the first. George Burnham of Portland, Maine, opened a cannery in 1860. By the 1870s numerous
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