Love and Sardines
An unexplored opportunity.
Hi all! I’m down home in Philadelphia helping my sister move. As you may imagine this is not leaving a lot of time to write. Instead, I’ve pulled out this story from the first year of America Eats! that many of you haven’t seen. But even if you had, it’s different. Hope you enjoy it.~ Pat
My husband sometimes thinks I go too far for America Eats! Examples include baking the same cake three times in one day, each of them failures; getting lost on backroads where cell service/GPS cuts out; and bringing home a frozen lamb’s head (scroll down the piece). He’s a good man who tolerates all this because our long marriage gives him a certain latitude to share with others his wife’s foibles for a laugh.
However, the four whole sardines lounging in a bowl in the refrigerator yesterday morning was beyond the pale.
“What are those?” He asked when I came in for breakfast.
“Sardines.”
“For?”
“I’m going to grill them for dinner. ”
“Nope. No away. I’m not eating them.”
His stern incredulous tone of voice was very reminiscent of the one he used on our teenage sons whenever they tried something outlandishly stupid, such as not thinking we would hear them sneaking friends into the basement along with 40 oz size bottles of Olde English beer. I’m pretty sure I returned an indulgent smile.
An explanation of his fish phoebia:
It all started with his mother’s trout dinners and the many times he choked on bones which hardly elicited any concern from her because she was bent on raising sons of strong character. How choking on fish bones figured into the mix was never explained.
However, upon seeing any kind of fish on the counter, he says, “what is that?”
I say, “you’ve had it before. You like it.”
He doesn’t buy it. “Are there bones?”
I refrain from exasperation. “There’s no bones.”
I’ve spent more than twenty years repeating this sad conversation with him. It is one of the smaller bumps in an otherwise happy marriage. All our bumps are mainly tolerated because we are equally full of good humor and a jigger of grace. On the matter of fish, we’ve settled on his acceptance of mild tasting salmon filets. Maybe cod if it’s fried in a good batter and doused with malt vinegar, as in fish and chips.
Unfortunately, sardines have a rather pronounce flavor and are packed with fine bones. A good wife might have taken this into consideration but she did not. I’d recently read Colette’s memoir Break of Day and there’s a scene in it where she decides to seduce a young man by offering a garden lunch of grilled sardines and wine. If Colette considers sardines an aphrodisiac, I’m sold because, as everyone knows, after millions of years of blissful marriage, you shouldn’t ignore any possibility of an aphrodisaiacs, even if it happens to be sardines.
Perhaps I should have told my husband this but, in the heat of defending my sardines, I forgot.
Later that morning, he thought he had a way to put the matter to rest. “We don’t have a grill.”
“I’m going to do it on the chimenea.”
“How you going to do that,” he exclaimed with a bit of an AH HA! CHECKMATE! to his voice.
The chimenea situation:
I really wanted a chimenea for a little backyard so we could have friends and family over and not endanger their health during the lockdown. Also, my husband is a fanatic about building fires and, since we don’t have a fireplace, I thought a chemenea would be a nice way to satify his very pronounced primal need for fire building. The chimenea I showed him came with gadgets inside to filter out most smoke pollutions. The flue could be removed to lay a grill grate over the fire box which engendered visions of food tasting of different woods rather than charcoal and lighter fluid. How marvelous would that be?
The next door neighbor, who once took out an order of protection against us (a very long story), did not think it was at all marvelous when she heard about our impending purchase. She’s the kind of neighbor who knows every municipal and federal law there is and lives to enforce them. These were her objections:
The fire department forbids them (them meaning open fire pits. Chimeneas, much like grills, are not open fire pits. It is a known fact that every member of the fire department in our neighborhood—and there are many—have either a firepit or a chimenea).
It’s environmentally damaging (this is why my flue has a many-layered filter system).
Phone wires and our tree would catch on fire, thus endangering her house. (There are no phone wires crossing our yard and the tree sits 10 feet away from where we would set the chimenea up on our stone patio. The tree’s lowest branch is 20 feet up.)
She doesn’t like us (it’s complicated—the order of protection doesn’t help).
We follow the “don’t poke the bear” rule with her so we cancelled our chimenea order. Then the dear neighbors on the other side of our house, and who happen to be hard-nose lawyers, pointed out an obvious fix. If the fire company does show up, simply throw a couple of hot dogs on the grill. This will show it’s nothing but a barbeque. We reordered the chimenea and as soon as it arrived my husband started building fires for me to cook, always with the garden hose and a small fire extinguisher nearby. But the threat of a new order of protection hung over our enjoyment and after awhile we just stopped building fires.
This is probably the reason why my husband thought he had put to rest the sardine folly.
You’d think after all this time he’d know me better.
How to prepare sardines when you’ve never done it before:
After discovering the little fellows haven’t been gutted, split their bellies open and scoop out the red and purple mess inside. Later, find a video that demonstrates how ,if you chop off the head and pull it off, the sardines’ insides will come out in one long bloody thread.
Wash out the sardines’ insides and pat dry. Lay them on a paper towel and wipe them down to remove whatever scales remain on their skin. Cut a few small slashed across them on either side. Place them on a plate.
Make a marinade of chopped garlic, fresh thyme, rosemary, juice from two medium size freshly squeezed lemon, and a tablesoon of olive oil. Pour it over and inside the fish then refrigerate to rest while you go out and build a fire.
How to grill sardines on a wood fire when you’ve never done it before:
Make sure the troublesome neighbor is not around. Have the garden hose and a fire extinguisher nearby just in case she is around and/or embers escape.
Arrange kindle over crumpled-up newspapers in the chimenea and light. When the fire gets going, gingerly lay a few logs over the flames, making sure not to cut off the flow of oxygen.
You used too much kindling and now the logs are exploding. Step back and aim the fire house toward the sparking .
Miraculously, all goes well. When the flames calm down, carefully lay the well-seasoned grill on top and wait a few seconds until it’s hot. Place the sardines across the grill. Between their own oiliness and the marinade, the fish will cause the fire to flare up. Pick up the hose and step further back.
Grill the sardines for 3 minutes then flip over with a long spatula. One of those fancy fish grill contraptions could be helpful here but the fish will remain in one piece. The flesh, particularly the tail, will brown nicely, anyway.
Grill the other side for no longer than 2 minutes. A little charred skin is desirable but be careful not to overcook the flesh!
Remove the sardines to a plate and squirt lemon juice on them.
How to serve two people who might not mind an aphrodisiac:
Set the table for two people and pour glasses of cold rosé wine. Beer pairs well, too.
Yell that the sardines are ready.
Sit down and wait. Wait some more. Call again. A head may pop out of a window and shout “WHAT?!”
“DINNER!”
“I HEARD YOU!”
Once it’s obvious that you’re dining alone, scoop two sardines onto a plate. Devour the sweet meat in its crispy skin. Pour another glass of rosé.
Four sardines turn out to satisfy one diner. It’s surprising how fast a full bottle of rosé can be reduce to a third.
About an hour later, my husband showed up. I’m a good wife so I had grilled him a small piece of salmon over the dying embers.
“Where’s the sardines,” he asked when I set his plate before him.
“I ate them. They were delicious,” I said and refrained from telling him he had passed on an aphrodisiac.
Good stuff, so funny. I have that photo that you put up top on a card, for our anniversary.
It is a great story! Love the first photo.