TIME FOR TINNED FISH

These beautiful packages of preserved seafood look like frameable art, but they’re a coastal cook’s secret weapon for delicious soups and sandwiches

- BECCA MILLSTEIN

Tinned fish is magic for a thousand reasons—enough to inspire me to co-found Fishwife Tinned Seafood Co. in 2020 to share that magic. Let me count just some of the reasons: Using tinned seafood in a recipe eliminates the entire process of cooking a fish. You can get a shocking 30 grams of protein in a 3.5-ounce tin. It can sit in your cupboard for years and still be at its best on its 5th birthday. And each tin tells an entirely different and unique story of the waters it’s from and the cannery in which it was packed.

In sum, tinned fish makes your life better, easier, more exciting, and more joyful.

Running Fishwife as its CEO, I enjoy a front-row seat to all the ways that folks eat tinned fish in their everyday lives. I watch as art imitates life, life imitates art—we write recipes and witness our customers serving them to friends, family, themselves. And we see home cookscreate dishes featuring our tins, dishes that never even occurred to us and that we feel compelled to share with our community.

The Fishwife Cookbook is a result of that back-and-forth, full of the recipes (including two on page 24) that our community embraced and those that the community brought forward.

Now grab your baguette, butter, Castelvetrano olives, flaky sea salt, and a little glass of chilled wine—it’s tinned fish time.

TROUT SALAD SANDWICH

Almost everyone knows and loves a classic tuna salad, but this trout salad is far from traditional; it trades fennel for celery and tangy labne for mayonnaise. What it lacks in familiarity, it makes up for in flavor and nutrient density. We love ours sandwiched between two pieces of whole-grain bread, but feel free to scale up the recipe and serve it as a dip with crunchy vegetables.

SERVES 1