Anna Hezel is a food journalist and author of the new book “Tin to Table: Fancy, Snacky Recipes for Tin-thusiasts and A-fish-ionados.” The recipe collection – hailed by Bon Appetit's as one of 2023’s best cookbooks – explores the world of tinned seafood, which Hezel says is going through a culinary renaissance. “Tin to Table” tackles everything from new spins on kitchen classics – like the Tuna Noodle Casserole 2.0 with Salt and Vinegar Crumbs – to more adventurous fare like Sardine Curry Puffs and the Triple Pickle Smoked Salmon Butter Sandwich. On Saturday, Hezel is taking part in an event at the Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts. She spoke with WAMC.
HEZEL: Tinned fish is this part of European and American culture that's been around since the early 1800s. In the United States, we're just seeing this crazy revival right now, this perfect storm of factors in the last five or so years that have just set the tin fish train in motion. I think the pandemic and people's reliance on shelf stable pantry items kind of catalyzed this, but we're also seeing a lot of people start to buy their groceries online, which is great for collecting tinned fish. And a lot of online grocery services and direct to consumer companies are kind of popping up, making it really easy to collect tins, special tins of sardines and mackerel and tuna, and sort of build your own home collection of tinned fish.
WAMC: Now, who are the industry leaders? And where is this happening?
For many years, Spain and Portugal have been countries that have really rich traditions of canning anchovies and sardines and mackerel and tuna and mussels and many other types of seafood. But in the last few years, a few more specialty canneries in the United States have opened up, and also American companies who are importing goods but selling under their own label. So, there are companies like Fish Wife, which has become very popular in the last couple of years. That's a big one in the United States. There are companies like Wild Fish Cannery, which is based in Alaska. And they're sort of an industry leader in really sustainable salmon cannon, and also canning items like octopus that's bycatch from other fishing endeavors in Alaska, and a few other types of seafood that are caught wild in Alaska. There's also Island Creek Oysters in Duxbury, Massachusetts, actually. They are in the process of opening a cannery on the east coast. It's going to be the first East Coast United States cannery in maybe a century or so. They're doing really interesting work also, canning super sustainable seafood and super local seafood from New Bedford, Massachusetts.
WAMC: Now, what is the culinary appeal of the tinned fish? What are the attributes that you think are particularly unique to that realm?
When you think about going into the grocery store and buying fresh fish, usually the filets of salmon that you're buying – or haddock or cod – have been caught actually weeks ago and frozen and processed and transported hundreds of miles to get to a grocery store. By contrast, sort of ironically, tinned fish is often placed in the can within hours of being caught out of the ocean. So, even though it's canned, it's preserved for the long term, it's actually sort of cooked and prepared at its freshest possible moment. So, it's kind of this uniquely fresh way of experiencing the seafood, so you can taste a sardine sort of like frozen in time as it tasted just a few hours out of the ocean.
When it came to doing the research on recipes for the book- Walk me through that. Where did you first turn when you thought it was time to sort of compile this compendium of ways to turn tinned fish into actionable meals for folks?
Part of the reason I wanted to write my book “Tin to Table” was because as a food journalist, I started to realize that tinned seafood is part of so many cultures around the world, and it's already built into so many dishes and just sort of like the everyday cooking that a lot of people do. So, as I started obsessing over tinned fish and collecting it and researching it, I just started to notice it everywhere. Like, on restaurant menus and in older cookbooks, for sure. And I just started experimenting, but also talking to chefs about how they use it. So, my book has a few recipes that are contributed by chefs, people like Alex Raij in New York. He contributed a recipe that's really interesting, that's really salty anchovies paired with vanilla butter, which sounds crazy, but it's really surprisingly good. It was a lot of learning from chefs that I admire and trying things and also, it's just- Tinned seafood is such a practical thing to cook with, because you can just always have it around throughout the seasons as you're buying different fruits and vegetables. I just always have a big pile of tins in my kitchen. So, it's kind of a great fixture to experiment with, toss into pastas with fennel in the fall and winter or fresh tomatoes in the summer. You know, in everyday cooking- In the middle of the day when I'm making my lunch when I'm working from home, it's just there to toss onto a sandwich with whatever else they have laying around.
The anchovies and vanilla butter might be the reigning champion of my next question, but of the recipes you compiled, what stand out to you is particularly unique or fascinating ones?
One of the really cool ones was contributed by Akira Akuto and Nick Montgomery from the restaurant Konbi in LA, which is now closed, sadly. But they made this tuna sandwich on milk bread that I thought was really interesting technique. They just take water packed tuna, which is kind of like one of the cheapest, most widely accessible types of tinned seafood you can get in the United States. They take that, they drain off the water, and then they marinate it overnight in a combination of soy sauce and mirin, so it just picks up this really interesting salty, sweet, savory flavor. And then they use that to just make a mayo-y tuna salad. And it just was such an interesting little twist to put on a pretty cheap and accessible ingredient, and I thought that was a really cool, really clever way of making a tuna sandwich.
So, you're coming up to Berkshire County, to beautiful Lenox to spread the word of tinned fish up here in the 413. What are you hoping folks take away from this event in Lenux? What are you trying to communicate to them about the world of tinned fish?
I mean, when I started to research tinned fish for “Tin to Table,” I realized that there are so many products to choose from, there are so many roads to go down. More and more brands are becoming available in the United States of tinned sardines and tuna, salmon, mussels, all of these things. So, it can be a little bit intimidating if you're just getting started. So, one of the things I'm hoping to do at the Bookstore in Lenox is just open some tins, open some bottles of wine, have some fun and give people an opportunity to taste some tins that they've never had and give people a little bit of guidance about what to do with those tins at home, how to turn them into a party or just into a casual weeknight dinner.
