Sardine recipes

Browse our superb collection of sardine recipes, including Shaun Rankin's grilled sardines on foccacia bread and Tom Aikens' bouillabaisse recipe, plus Matthew Fort looks at how different cuisines serve the humble sardine.

Fort on Sardines

There’s something hard to resist about a fresh sardine, with its bright, inquisitive eye, shimmering scales, silver on the sides, darkening to gunmetal blue on top, and its neat, trim, perfect portion control shape rich in all sorts of good oils. I think we think of the sardine as the archetypal Mediterranean fish, grilled in the Portuguese fashion; fried in olive oil in the manner of Spanish; broken in bits and lined up with raisins, wild fennel and pine nuts to make a sauce for bucatini in the baroque style of Sicilians, and if you saw ‘Grilled Pilchard’ on the menu, you’d probably pass on with a barely suppressed shudder. And yet, what is a sardine, but a pilchard that hasn’t grown up?

Cornwall used to lead the world in pilchard production, still does, in a manner of speaking, even if they aren’t there in the numbers of old, According the peerless Alan Davidson in his majestic ‘North Atlantic Seafood, which should be on the bookshelf of every self-respecting cook, quoting Frank Buckland’s The Natural History of British Fishes (1883) one boat took 80,000 pilchards in a single night. There’s still a decent pilchard fishery there, and although you don’t often see fresh pilchards, they turn up in tins.

That’s the thing with sardines. They spread from Portugal, France and Spain, to Britain. They’re plentiful, so you can eat them with a clear conscience. And they’re versatile. The Italians eat them in their larval, known as neonati or gianchetti. And I’m very partial to a tinned sardine, kept in olive oil or spicy tomato sauce. Loaded onto toast with a slice or two of cucumber, they make a very decent light lunch. Still, fresh is best.

Article written by Matthew Fort

Sardine recipes

Grilled sardines on ciabatta with tomato confit, basil and tapenade Robert Thompson

Course:	Starter
Complexity:	Easy
Cooking Time:	45 minutes plus 6 hours confiting of tomatoes
Serves:	4

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Grilled sardines on toasted foccacia bread Shaun Rankin

Course:	Starter
Complexity:	Easy
Cooking Time:	40 minutes
Serves:	4

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Grilled sardines with paprika mayonnaise Nathan Outlaw

Course:	Starter
Complexity:	Easy
Cooking Time:	35 minutes plus 1 hour marinating time
Serves:	4

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Sardines on toast Adam Gray

Course:	Starter
Complexity:	Medium
Cooking Time:	1 hour
Serves:	4

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Bouillabaisse Tom Aikens

Course:	Main
Complexity:	Medium
Cooking Time:	3 hours 15 minutes
Serves:	4

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