As you know, we’re always excited to find good food of any kind. And, thanks to the Esquiline Market just three blocks from us, we’ve been making one of our all-time favourites, the Sicilian pasta con le sarde, pasta with sardines. Like many Sicilian dishes, it has flavours from the Arab world (saffron, pine nuts, and raisins), and from Italy (fennel, sardines, and anchovies). We usually make it with frozen or even canned sardines, but finding them fresh from the Adriatic has our fins wagging with joy (or it would, if fins wagged). Yes; this is a dish with fish and fruit and pasta, and it’s absolutely delicious. Don’t knock it until you try it!
This recipe requires a bit more work than some and also a bit more guts. Literally, as you’ll be gutting the sardines. On the plus side, they are small fish and so once you’ve prepped enough to make this dish, you’ll have learned a new skill.
Gutting Sardines
Skip this section if you know your way around a fish’s insides. Otherwise, take a deep breath. Grab a fish in your non-dominant hand and look this guy in the eyes. Rinse it, being careful to remove the scales. With a sharp knife, make a slit from below the fish’s chin – if fish had chins – all the way through the belly to the tail, parallel to the sardine’s spine on the bottom. Then cut inward on either side of the sardine’s head, where the ears would be if fish had ears. Jiggle the knife but don’t sever the head. Put the knife down and grasp the head firmly with one hand while peeling the sides apart with the other. If all goes well, you’ll end up with a head and guts and a spine in one hand and a filleted fish in the other. Often you’ll need to pull or cut the tail off. When you are working with bigger fish, remove fins from the bottom and sides; we’ve found that in smaller ones they don’t bother us.
If it doesn’t go well, rest easy: you’ve got thirty more to practice with (assuming you have smaller sardines). If there’s a lot of flesh left on the spine, hold it in one hand while running a finger and thumb along each side to pull it off. Don’t do this the other direction or you will introduce a million tiny bones into your fingers. Note: gutting fish is easier with bigger fish, but bigger fish also have bigger bones, so you’ll need to be extra-careful pulling them out. The smaller bones you can eat, along with the skin – they have lots of calcium!
Ingredients
This recipe serves four. You will need nothing beyond the kitchen essentials.
- 1/2 kilo/1 lb of whole sardines, roughly 10 large ones or 30 smaller ones, cleaned and gutted, then sliced into about 1 in/2 cm pieces
- 2T/30g olive oil plus 1t/5g olive oil, plus another 1-2T/lots
- 1 medium sized onion, chopped
- 1/2 fennel bulb, chopped (you are aiming for the same amount of fennel as onion, so it might be more or less). If it came with fronds, keep them. And if you can find wild fennel, grab it (and send us some)
- 1/4c/1 oz raisins, ideally golden
- pinch of saffron threads: if you don’t have real saffron, don’t bother with the powdered stuff. (Saffron is expensive, bit it really makes this dish.)
- 1/2c/2 oz dry white wine (water will do just fine)
- 1/4c/1 oz pine nuts, toasted
- 4 anchovies, oil-packed
- 1/2c/2 oz bread crumbs
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1 lb/450 g of long pasta, ideally bucatini
- optional: toasted fennel seeds
Pasta with Sardines Recipe
Put the pasta water on to boil (salt it more than you think you should!). Toast the pine nuts in a small pan. Keep that pan handy, because you’ll want it for breadcrumbs. Sauté the onion and fennel in 2T olive oil in your biggest pan until soft. While this is going on, soak the raisins and the saffron (if you’re using it) in the white wine, heated or at room temperature, or boiled water, or half of each. When the vegetables are soft and translucent, pour in the wine or water to deglaze the pan. Then add the raisins, saffron, pine nuts, and anchovies; raise the heat for a few minutes, then lower it to medium. In that other pan, toast the breadcrumbs in 1t olive oil, adding salt, pepper, and the optional fennel seeds.
At some point during the above, your pasta water will boil. Add the pasta! Italian pasta is cooked less thoroughly than elsewhere, so we usually pull it out at about 7 minutes. Once the pasta is cooked, drain it, but keep some of the water. Add the pasta to the pan with everything else. Stir to mix, and then add half the breadcrumbs and the pasta water, by the spoonful, and olive oil. Mix it all up; you’re aiming to have a liquidy sauce that sticks to the pasta, rather than a pile of pasta on top of a pile of other stuff.
Serve with the remaining breadcrumbs and fennel fronds, if you have them, on top. Sicilians would drizzle more olive oil on each serving too!
