As you wander the aisles of Starrs in Richmond Heights, you might at first think, “Are you kidding? For the price of this can of tuna, you could pick up a 12-pack of Chicken of the Sea, a jar of Miracle Whip, and a loaf of Bunny Bread.”
Take a closer look at that canned Charlie, however, and you’ll see this isn’t exactly the tuna you’re going to be adding to the overcooked noodles in the casserole like Mom used to make. Starrs is selling tinned tuna ventresca, sometimes described as “foie gras of the sea,” more accurately described “tuna bacon.” It comes from the belly of the fish, where there’s more rich fat glistening than on a June weekend at a Key Biscayne beach.
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If you ate sushi back before it became so popular, you’ll fondly remember chu-toro, the same cut of the tuna belly that’s now become almost impossible to find even in high-end sushi restaurants. It’s so generously marbled with fat, it looks as if it’s been frosted. That’s ventresca. Pop open the can of Ortiz Bonito del Norte, and what’s inside bears little resemblance to the chunked tuna that fills sandwiches all across the land.
This is the tuna—bonito if you want to get ichthyologically precise—of salad Nicoise, that garden’s worth of fresh vegetables arrayed for a glorious taste of summer. This time of year, those ingredients are still in short supply. If you want to experience ventresca right now, go with a simpler tapas-style preparation, with a slab of the delicately beautiful, flaky fish on a curved leaf of Romaine lettuce, decorated with a sprinkle of Spanish migas (toasted breadcrumbs).
The ventresca is just the start here: Starrs probably has the largest selection of European canned seafoods—which, admittedly, does not sound all that appetizing, European or not. As with the Ortiz bonito, you have to look closer (as in above the Luxardo cherries and wild mountain capers in sea salt that caught our eye).
That’s not to say, however, that what’s on the surface is all that unattractive. Jose Gourmet is a Portuguese company specializing in canned foods sold in attractive boxes that are literally art. Seriously. These are cardboard masterpieces the size of a deck of playing cards. If you’re looking for the perfect housewarming gift, have one framed to be hung in a new kitchen. They’re that nice. Inside, Jose’s packed some amazingly good sardines, smoked and packed in olive oil. They’re fine by themselves, but there are a couple of recipes that you might want to consider.
Otoko-koroshi donburi is a nouveau Japanese dish. It means “man killer rice bowl,” named after a kooky story by the late Yoko Mori. It was supposed to be so delicious that no man could finish it. Fry the sardines and enough of their oil to coat the pan until they’re heated through. Fill a bowl with rice; top with the sardines and a scatter of finely chopped scallions. It’s a perfect kind of Sunday-night light dinner when you want something filling that doesn’t require a lot of preparation.
Want to get a little fancier? Boil water for a single serving of spaghetti, and fry a can of the sardines with a little of their oil, a finely chopped garlic clove, and a small chili pepper. Add a tablespoon of chopped onions, and continue frying until the onions become translucent. Add the sardine mixture to the drained spaghetti. It isn’t as beautiful as those Jose Gourmet boxes, but it tastes considerably better.
Then there’s squid, cute little baby squid, packed in olive oil and their own glossy jet ink. Starrs has Ramon Pena squid on its shelves—some are chipirones, to be precise, young squidlets whose plump bodies are stuffed with their own tentacles. They’re harvested off Galicia and lightly poached before being canned. The taste is nutty, just mildly seafood-ish. They’re fine eaten with any sort of crunchy flatbread, but try chopping them roughly, then adding chopped celery and red onions. Add a squirt of lemon juice and olive oil, and season with a dust of sea salt and black pepper to dig into a seafood salad the likes of which can be found at a beach side joint in A Coruña.
Where on the Atlantic coast of Galicia or inside Starrs, you can also find berberechos, or cockles. Think of them as the smallest, sweetest clams you’ve ever enjoyed. The beaches in this part of northwest Spain are broad and flat, tidal zones loaded with more seafood than a whole Lent’s worth of St. Louis fish frys. Harvesting berberechos there has always been an occupation for women, who wade shin deep in the low tides and drag fanged rakes with wire baskets through the sand, dredging up the berberechos.
The way you want to try these fat jewels is a la plancha, grilled, just long enough to heat them. Use a hot cast-iron skillet drizzled with olive oil. Add the cockles, along with some sea salt and pepper, and grill for just a minute or so. Plate them, and spritz with fresh lemon. It makes for a perfectly happy appetizer, especially if when paired with one of the oaky, big-bodied Chardonnays sold at Starrs.
Jars of piparras—the Basque equivalent of shishito peppers, pickled and tangy—might be paired with one of those sardines for a classic Basque pinchos snack.
The longer we stood around looking at the selection of fins in tins, the more possibilities appeared. And we hadn’t even made it to the fresh seafood counter or the bounty of cheeses at the back of the store.
The real reason Europe’s canned fish and seafood aren’t more popular among the gourmet set? Well, as we alluded, they’re canned fish and seafood. It just doesn’t sound all that tasty, or upscale. It might help if we thought of them as fish conserves, though that sounds a little like something you might think of as spreading on toast.
Come to think of it, when it comes to those berberchos, that doesn’t sound all that bad.
