Tinned fish recipes

Tinned fish is a pantry must – especially when you’ve got the builders in. My entire flat is covered in a thick layer of dust. Before creating these recipes I spent five hours cleaning my kitchen, up to about head-height anyway. I wasn’t going to do all the top shelves and plate racks because tomorrow it’ll all be covered in dust again.

So it’s snacks, toast, sandwiches, pot noodles, one-dish bakes and takeaways on the menu. It’s all I can cope with. I’m trying to work through my pantry supplies, trying to reduce the amount of stuff I own generally. I have tons of plates, cups, gadgets. Let me stand up and say: my name is Kerstin and I’m a kitchenware addict. I could start a prop shop for stylists. I’ve embarked on collections of vintage enamelware, cut crystal bowls, blue and white china, Portuguese cabbage ware. Every week I go to Portobello and buy something. It’s ridiculous, this ceramic lust.

Back to food and specifically tinned fish. I invest in Spanish and Portuguese tinned fish. Sometimes supermarkets like Lidl will stock Ortiz tuna cheaply, so that’s worth looking out for. And you should always have a jar of anchovies in the store cupboard. Anchovies have a long history of providing an umami boost to food: the Romans used garum, a fermented anchovy sauce, to spice up their dishes; fish sauce is widely used in Thai and Malaysian food.

If you can, buy Cantabrian anchovies, which are firm, dense and clean tasting. People think they don’t like anchovies, but what they’ve experienced is poor anchovies or too many anchovies, say on a pizza. A small amount perks up a dish or a sauce, so my advice for those cooking for the haters is to hide them.

Anchovies have multiple uses. Throw a couple plus a chilli pepper into a cooked tomato sauce and you have puttanesca for your pasta. Mince one into olive oil, mustard, garlic, lemon juice and coddled egg, and you have a caesar salad dressing.

Other store cupboard tinned essentials include tuna and sardines, but you can also explore more exotic fare such as tinned swordfish, smoked mussels and clams for an impromptu spag vong.