Portugal's Conservas
On the night of June 12, Lisbon smells of sardines. It is the eve of the feast of Santo António, the city's saint, and every neighborhood sets up charcoal grills in the street and cooks fresh sardines by the thousand, served on a slice of bread that soaks up the fat. The sardine is the city's fish, the country's fish, and the fish that Portugal has been sealing into tins since the 1850s. What makes Portugal different from every other canning nation is that the tin never lost its dignity. It sits in a Lisbon shop wrapped in illustrated paper, on a Porto tasca's menu beside the grilled fish, and in a Portuguese grandmother's cupboard as a food in its own right, not a fallback.
This is the culture behind the Portuguese tins on our shelf. Our history of tinned fish explains how the tin was invented and our day at the cannery shows how one is made; this is how the Portuguese live with it.
The fish country
Portugal is a narrow country with a long Atlantic coast and a cold, rich current running down it, and its people eat more fish per head than nearly anyone in Europe. Bacalhau, salt cod, is the national obsession, with a claimed recipe for every day of the year, but the sardine is the everyday fish: cheap, abundant from late spring to autumn, fattest in summer, grilled whole over charcoal and eaten with the fingers. Canning it was the obvious thing to do with the surplus, and the first Portuguese canneries opened in the Algarve and around Setúbal, south of Lisbon, in the 1850s.
The cannery towns
Three regions built the industry. Setúbal, on its own estuary south of the capital, became the sardine capital of the nineteenth century. Matosinhos, the fishing port beside Porto, grew dozens of canneries along its waterfront in the twentieth. The Algarve towns, Portimão and Olhão, packed sardines and tuna for export. At the peak, in the 1930s and 1940s, Portugal had hundreds of canneries and the industry employed tens of thousands, most of them women at the packing tables. The Portimão cannery museum, housed in a former factory, preserves that world. After the wars, refrigeration and cheap frozen fish closed most of them, and the survivors survived by refusing to lower the standard: hand-cleaned, hand-packed, olive oil, the same fish on the same day.
The shops that made tins beautiful
In the 2010s Lisbon rediscovered its own tins. Old conserveiras that had wrapped their tins in paper for a century found their shops full of tourists and young Lisboetas; new shops opened selling nothing but tins, arranged by species and year like a wine cellar; and a wave of brands commissioned artists to illustrate every label. José Gourmet, whose sardines in Azores butter we wrote about at length, turned the tin into a gift. Ati Manel, a revived label from the north, put its founder's face on the wrapper. The design revival did something economic as well as aesthetic: it let the small canneries charge what hand-packing costs, and it exported the Portuguese idea that a tin is an object worth choosing carefully, which is the idea our whole tinned fish shelf rests on.
What a Portuguese kitchen does with a tin
On bread, cold. The simplest and most common: a sardine or a mackerel on a slice of good bread, a squeeze of lemon, a few slices of raw onion, salt. The Portuguese version of our sardine toast is the one with butter.
With potatoes. Boiled potatoes, still warm, with tinned tuna or sardines flaked over, olive oil, vinegar, onion, parsley and a chopped hard-boiled egg. A Portuguese summer lunch, and a use for the oil in the tin.
In rice. Arroz de atum: rice cooked with onion, garlic, tomato and a tin of tuna, the oil from the tin going into the pan first. Comfort food in every Portuguese home and a fifteen-minute dinner.
At the table, as the meal. A petiscos spread, the Portuguese cousin of tapas: two or three tins opened on the table, bread, olives, a plate of cheese, and a bottle of cold vinho verde or a glass of the white port the Portuguese drink as an aperitif. Our no-cook dinner party is this idea with the shopping list attached.
The etiquette
The Portuguese open the tin at the table and eat from it. They keep the oil and dip bread in it. They serve sardines with bread rather than a fork, and mackerel with lemon rather than sauce. They do not cook the good tins; the fish has been cooked once, in the cannery, and again in the sterilizer, and a third time would be a waste. And they keep tins for years. A Portuguese pantry has vintage tins in it, and a good sardine in olive oil is thought to peak two to five years after canning, which our storage guide explains from the other end.
Bringing it home
For the June feast, without the street grills: a tin of sardines, a slice of grilled bread, raw onion, lemon, and a glass of something cold and green. For the pantry: three Portuguese tins, one sardine, one mackerel, one tuna, and a bottle of olive oil. For a gift: any José Gourmet tin, because the wrapper does the wrapping. The Portuguese tins on our shelf are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Santo António, we are told, approves.
