In the old days my mom made tuna fish, she called it, meaning tuna salad. The size of the hard boiled eggs that she mashed with a fork have me scarred to this day. I never make tuna salad, and I never eat anything out of a can. (Another trademark of my youth.)
Now the tuna I eat comes out of a pouch, and I don’t have to recycle a can. The tuna I get is always albacore, because today’s “regular” tuna bears little resemblance to the chunks of my youth. Unless you get the premium stuff, today’s tuna is shreds.
A few years ago the restaurant N7 arrived on the scene and the buzz was about the canned fish they served. What? Canned fish? I soon learned that there is a newer hipper name for this. It is now called tinned fish, and it is what the cool people eat.. It too, bears little resemblance to anything I have eaten from the sea that is not fresh.
Not long ago a delightful book arrived at the house from the publicist of a new author. It’s called The Fishwife Cookbook. It is colorful and fun and intriguing. I read it cover to cover, and was captivated by the backstory and the fact that the entire book was based on fish from a can.
The author spent a year abroad in college and became fascinated by little shops in Lisbon with stacks of colorful boxes of what turned out to be cans of fish. She started collecting these cans and has made a career of importing fish carefully sourced from all over the world. She was even on Shark Tank, where she received a hefty sum to grow the company.
Titillated by all this and ever curious. I agreed to do the interview. I was planning to keep myself in check because the whole idea seemed ridiculous to me. We live in America where we have an abundance of fresh fish and the money to pay for it.
The interview didn’t happen, but a few weeks ago I was in a gourmet shop called Le Provisions and I saw a few cans of this tinned fish from Fishwife. I played it safe and bought the tuna for $7.99. Baby steps. The tuna comes from Galicia, Spain, a place I am dying to visit, located in a remote spot in the northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula on the Atlantic.
It was Friday and this is Lent so it was time to break out the fish. I had some leftover crostini and some lettuce and I popped open the little can. I have to admit it looked rather luscious. It was pale pink with big flakes and it was packed in good olive oil and I couldn’t wait to try it.
I don’t know if it was the power of suggestion but I felt fancy just eating this canned tuna. I want to do a blind taste test with my Albacore in the pouch, and I want to try some of the other more exotic fish in the line. I really can’t believe I’m saying this, but I may even try some of the recipes in the book. After that, I'll work my way up to N7.
