Sardines in Butter for Dinner

On a recent visit to Paris, my wife, Jackie, and I went shopping for Breton sardines. In the French region of Brittany sardines are still canned in the old-fashioned way, from fresh, whole (though headless) fish that are often fried before being arranged in the familiar tins.

Someone had recommended La Petite Chaloupe, a store in the 13th arrondissement, as having the best selection in town, but not wanting to make that trip, we looked at the food department in the Galéries Lafayette department store. Well, they must have had 16 linear feet of shelving devoted to good-quality canned sardines, most of them in extra-virgin olive oil. There were “vintage” sardines from several years; ones with flavorings; with bones; without bones; you name it.

Many of them were packed in beautiful cans for customers (dare I say obsessive customers?) who lay down their sardines to age (do sardines really age, in a good way? I guess so) before opening them and serving them, perhaps on one of the special plates that Bernardaud, one of France’s fanciest crockery companies, produces for the purpose. 

They also had sardines packed not in oil but, get this, in butter: “sardines au beurre” or “sardines à poêler.” These are intended to be heated up in a pan after the can has been set in warm water to melt the butter, then eaten with white beans or steamed potatoes. I’d never seen them before and couldn’t resist buying a couple of cans.

We ate them for dinner the other night. To my surprise, they were quite different. One (from Conserverie la Quiberonnaise) was saltier, with plumper, more delicate fish and with far more butter — which was good because it dressed the steamed potatoes amply. The other (from Conserverie la Belle Iloise) offered more intensely flavored (though less salty) fish, more typical of the good canned sardines with which we’re familiar, and a little less butter — though with a nice hit of lemon juice. The fish were dissimilar enough that I wondered whether they were different species (on Latin names, the cans were silent).

Anyway, both were delicious. Warmed through, and especially served with potatoes, the sardines seemed quite a lot like dinner. While very cooked — after all, they’d been through a canning process — they were almost unctuous and had a true fish flavor, as opposed to the fishy taste that a lot of people don’t care for. The sardine-flavored butter was as good as the canners claim it is: we sopped it all up with bread and wished we’d had more.

These butter-canned sardines are not easy to find in the US. They don’t appear on amazon.com, which suggests a certain rarity, although if you search elsewhere you’ll find them — at prices running the better part of three times the five bucks a can I paid in Paris.

But our dinner made me wonder whether good olive-oil-packed sardines might not lend themselves to being warmed and served with beans or potatoes. I remember my mother heating canned sardines in tomato sauce — what she called “tomato herring.” Does anyone out there eat heated-up sardines?

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