Sardine

Try these halibut and canned sardine cakes instead of crab cakes for a starter or light lunch.

This spaghetti with fennel and sardines turns a few simple pantry ingredients into a rustic seafood feast.

This take on salsa verde—made with parsley, cilantro, capers, and lemon juice—is a particularly cooling complement to oily sardines.

This simple but delicious sardine rillettes requires only two motor skills: opening a can of good sardines and smashing things together with a fork.

Sardines are a sustainable fish option, and tossing them with charred fennel and bright, roasted cherry tomatoes might just be the best thing to do with them.

Salting fish removes the fishy-tasting juice from the flesh.

Don’t let the veggies hang out in the vinegar for too long. You want them to stay crunchy!

Chef Renee Erickson has access to the best seafood anywhere; when it comes to sardines, she goes with Matiz sardines in olive oil.

Fresh sardines are nothing like their tinned cousins; their flavor is rich and far more delicate. Dressed with a miso glaze and augmented by rainbow carrots and fresh fennel, this is a wonderful, light meal.

"If you don't like sardines," says Lett, "you're going to today." Make sure to ask your fishmonger to remove the center bones but leave the head and tail intact.

Harvests from the great, silent fields of sun-bronzed wheat result in more bread than pasta for la tavola siciliana, yet there is a trio of pasta dishes that is cooked throughout the island. One of them dresses pasta in eggplant and tomatoes perfumed with wild mint and basil, the whole dusted with grated, salted ewe’s milk ricotta. Called often pasta alla Norma in celebration of Catanian son Vincenzo Bellini it can be a gorgeous dish. Then there is pasta chi vrocculi arriminati—dialect for a dish that calls for a paste of cauliflower and salt anchovies studded with raisins and pine nuts. Although it is luscious, it cannot compete with the glories of the island’s pasta con le sarde. A dish full of extravagant Arab timbres, it employs fresh, sweet sardines, salt anchovies, wild fennel, and a splash of saffroned tomato. One presents the pasta cool, as though heat would be violence against its sensuousness. Wild fennel grows abundantly on the lower shanks of Sicily’s mountains and, too, along the craggy paths of some of her islands. I used to collect wild fennel along the banks of the Sacramento River and I’ve heard tell of great clumps of its yellow lace heads bobbing along country roads in America’s Northeast. Now I find it a few kilometers from our home in thickets against the pasture fences along the Via Cassia on the road to Rome. Though the scent and the savor of cultivated fennel is sweeter, it behaves well in collaboration with these other elements and yields a still-sumptuous dish.

An ancient practice to conserve some windfall of fish or vegetables is to fry them in good olive oil and tuck them under coverlets of bread crumbs into a vinegary bath. The addition of saffron is a fillip only half a century old, when the golden pistils began to be prized beyond their value as a pharmaceutical (page 58). A dish made traditionally also in Puglia, I think the Abruzzesi hands fashion the most luscious versions. Zucchini or eggplant may be treated in the same way as the fish.