Jack Milroy’s One Hundred Days of Lunch and other concepts
Intrigued by the reviews and attracted by the idea of a quiet gem of a gallery showing a calmly witty exhibition I sought out Art First’s exhibition of Jack Milroy’s sculptured installations as an antidote to a frantic day visiting crowded, famous, large exhibitions.
I wasn’t disappointed. It was a tranquil oasis in the creative area of Fitzrovia, north of Oxford Street at the end of Wardour Street. Every construction was intriguing. Milroy must be the most patient, steady-handed artist. He produces scalpel-sculpted, fragile works from paper and film, often on a large scale, with meanings subtly subversive.
My favourite were three which were the same scale and exhibited one on top of the other, a triptych of a kind, named Cloud, Nest, Water. I’ve always had the idea that books were precious and damaging and that defacing them in any way was tantamount to a kind of heresy, but I felt entirely comfortable with these pieces which featured the vintage books spewing their perfectly shredded, fine-foaming, rolling contents, with illustrations of their central concepts rising out of the fine spiralling wires of intertwining paper. I discovered later that this piece is a Darwinian joke – the eggs in the middle hatching either into the angels above, or sea creatures below.
However, this is a food blog and I digress. The main exhibit (or at least the one in the window of the gallery) was entitled One Hundred Days of Lunch. It features a hundred tins of sardines, their metal shiny lids curled back and sardines emerging joyously upwards from within their canned imprisonment in a fine frenzy of freedom.
It’s more a statement of nature’s release than a pronouncement against fishing I’m assuming since sardines are some of the most sustainably harvested fish one can buy. I began to think about the numbers of ways there are of eating that faithful cupboard standby – the tin of sardines…. and I managed to come up with, yes, a hundred….a hundred and one in fact!
Jack Milroy is showing at Art First, 21 Eastcastle Street, London, W1.
Use Italian or Portuguese (Angelo Parodi are good) sardines in olive oil (avoid flavoured sauces…. tomato etc); or Cornish pilchards (pilchards are large sardines).
If you want your sardines to taste a bit less ‘fishy’ you can soak them in milk for an hour.
So …. here goes….. OVER A HUNDRED WAYS OF USING SARDINES……
ten ways of frying sardines:
1. Fry simply with lemon zest, garlic and lots of parsley
2. Fry with chickpeas, halved baby plum tomatoes, coriander, garlic, saffron and lime juice and zest
3. Sweet and sour sardines
4. Whisk seasoned flour into beer, coat sardines, fry in very hot oil (rapeseed) and serve with wedges of lime. Serve as a starter.
5. Put the sardines in the frying pan, and add garlic crushed with smoked salt and Panko breadcrumbs
6. Mash with parsley, garlic, breadcrumbs, grated parmesan and garlic. Roll into balls and fry. Serve on lettuce leaves and drizzle with good quality soy sauce and sprinkle with lime zest
7. Break up the sardines and fry with peanuts, garlic and a very few dried, crushed chillies. Roast for about ten minutes. Sprinkle generously over sea salt flakes and lime zest.
8. Coat with fine semolina and lemon zest – fry in hot oil
9. Fry and pour over hot chilli sauce
10. Fried with mashed avocado, Greek yoghurt and wasabi
six ways of using sardines in pasta:
11. Add to pasta together with fennel
12. Add to pasta with black olives, a tomato, a banana shallot, capers
sardines are great thrown into a pasta
13. Bake with pasta, baby vegetables and a cheese sauce
14. In a pasta with lemon, garlic, parmesan and broccoli
15. Add to spaghetti vongole
16. With black spaghetti and pesto
fourteen salads containing sardines:
17. Substitute for the anchovies in a Caesar salad
18. Substitute for the tuna in a salad niçoise
19. Coat with harissa and serve with couscous with rocket or watercress chopped into it
20. Add to a Greek salad
21. With deli artichoke hearts and red peppers; black olives, cucumbers
22. Make a salad of cucumbers, chickpeas and feta
23. Make a salad of fresh beetroot and dill
24. Broken up in a green salad with garlic croutons
25. Mix with sliced beetroot and dress with sour cream, horseradish and dill. Serve on watercress or rocket
26. Add to a mandarin or tangerine salad
27. Mixed with quinoa and seeded and chopped cucumber, wrapped in seaweed and served with tamari sauce as a dipping sauce
28. A salad of spinach leaves, crispy bacon and lemon zest
29. Mix with apple, walnuts, mustard and mayonnaise
30. With quinoa, roast broccolini and capers
fourteen ways to serve sardines with vegetables:
31. Serve with flash-fried cavolo nero, pine nuts and raisins… or substitute cabbage for the cavolo nero
32. Stuff peppers with breadcrumbs, sardines, garlic, olive oil and lime. Fry on all sides. Drizzle over soy sauce
33. Serve with saffron cauliflower roasted with pine nuts and raisins
34. Add to a Swiss chard gratin
35. With spinach and chickpeas
36. Roast them and serve with a leek vinaigrette
37. Serve with sauerkraut and warm rye bread
38. Cut aubergines in half, roast an hour, scoop out flesh, mix with mashed sardines, some chopped tomatoes, basil and a little yoghurt
39. Fry and serve with ratatouille
40. Grill and serve with samphire
41. With whole roast garlic and redcurrant jelly
42. Fry snow peas, water chestnuts, ginger and bamboo shoots in a wok. Add the broken up sardines. Add some chopped coriander. Drizzle over soy sauce.
43. Long thin strips of courgettes fried with raisins and pine nuts
44. With caponata
five ways of eating sardines with eggs:
45. Serve with scrambled eggs and chopped spring onion
46. Mix into fried rice and top with a fried egg
47. Add to an omelette, serve with a tomato salad
48. Roast with chopped banana shallot, parsley, garlic and some of the oil in the tin for five minutes or so. Break over a couple of eggs, roast for another five minutes or so until the white of the eggs has turned white. Serve with toast and maybe Wow Wow sauce….
49. Mix with hard boiled eggs and serve with toast
nine recipes for sardines and potatoes:
50. Break up and add, with capers to crushed lemony potatoes
51. With spinach and a baked potato
52. Make fishcakes with mashed potato, garlic, lemon juice (save the zest). Coat with a beaten egg and Panko breadcrumbs. Fry and serve with a green salad.
53. Mash with mayonnaise or yoghurt and eat with a jacket potato and chutney
54. In a potato and baby plum tomato salad with a mustard dressing
55. With sauce vierge and boiled jersey royal potatoes
56. Layer with sliced potatoes, tinned tomatoes (chopped, but use all the juice), chopped banana shallot, bunch of chopped parsley, garlic crushed with smoked salt, twenty grinds of Indonesian long black pepper
57. In a tagine with new potatoes, green pepper, chermoula, shallots, tomato and olives
58. On a baked potato topped with crème fraiche mixed with chopped, cooked mushrooms, garnished with shredded lettuce
fourteen ways of eating sardines with bread or in tacos:
59. Mix with aioli and chopped celery, spring onions and fennel, fill a baguette
60. Serve, mashed with tomato paste, in tacos with rocket and spring onions
61. Mash with chopped fresh tomato and basil and serve on French bread – bruschetta
62. On toast, mashed with Dijon mustard – Michel Roux Jr adds shallot and Worcestershire sauce
Marlene Dietrich used sardine and onion sandwiches as a cure for insomnia
63. On toast, mashed with garlic and herb Boursin
64. Bake buttered bread in the oven to toast it, top with a sardine, heat a bit longer. Serve with a lemon wedge and some yoghurt
65. In a sandwich with egg, capers, cucumbers and tomatoes
66. On toast with cucumbers, black olives and roast red peppers from the deli
67. Serve on rye bread with avocado. Make a dressing by mixing some of the olive oil from the tin with the juice of a lime and garnish with the lime zest and some furikake
68. Stuff a buttered roll with the broken up sardines, chopped sun dried tomato and crispy crumbled streaky bacon.
69. On French bread with brie, spring onions and sliced tomato
70. On toast with red onion chutney
71. With humous and coriander on toast
72. Marlene Dietrich was an insomniac who said the only thing which lulled her to sleep was a sardine and onion sandwich on rye.
four recipes for sardine pâtés and dips:
73. Add to tapenade and avocado for an interesting dip
74. Make a dip by mashing with avocado, a little Greek yoghurt, finely chopped rocket or watercress, and some chopped dill
75. Make pâté by mashing with Greek yoghurt, cottage cheese and a squeeze of lemon. Dust with sweet smoked Spanish paprika… or cayenne
76. A really EXCELLENT STARTER – an invention of Prince Radziwill – from a Hungarian family who has such extensive estates that, riding all day for three weeks, you still could not cross them. It comes from a time when smoked salmon was plentiful (as indeed it has now once again become) but the canning process for sardines had only just been discovered, so a tin of sardines was a luxury. In any case Prince Radziwill could clearly stand a couple of tins, and to these he (or some minion or other) added 120g/4oz of mashed, chopped smoked salmon, the same weight of butter, and a generous sprinkling of sweet, smoked Spanish paprika.
sardines in a pie, quiche or pizza – pastry of some kind:
77. Top a pizza base with tomato sauce, spread over sardines and rocket or watercress and a thinly sliced orange bell pepper
78. Roll out some puff pastry, and spread over some tomato puree or tomato sauce mixed with a little Patum Peperium if you have it (or anchovy paste). Top with broken sardines, capers, chopped banana shallot. Sprinkle with furikake.
79. Add to a cheesy quiche
80. Wrapped in filo with cayenne, lemon juice and Vache qui rit – plastic cheese
81. Make cheesy chou buns, and stuff with sardines mashed with feta
82. Stargazey pie – in a mustard sauce with bacon and hard-boiled eggs and a puff pastry crust
83. A pizza with red pepper, fontina, bacon and balsamic vinegar
eighteen random culinary uses for sardines:
84. Add to tomato sauce to make it a bit more interesting
85. Mix with ricotta, curry powder and lemon
86. Add to a fish pie
87. Put into a seafood chowder
88. Warm through and serve with chermoula
89. Make a fish curry with tomato sauce, curry powder, garlic, onions… and red cabbage or peppers or both
90. Shove as many mint leaves as you can into the tin, and leave somewhere warm for about an hour. Dust with seasoned flour and fry in rapeseed oil. Serve with lemon wedges.
91. Instead of mint infuse with thyme, and then barbeque or grill them
92. Spread a couple of layers of slices of apple with tapenade, top with sardines and a slice of lemon, roast ten minutes
93. With crème fraiche and a finely chopped prune
94. Wrap in bacon with a prune and make a fishy devil on horseback
95. With roasted sweet potatoes
96. With mint, garlic and lemon
97. With mozzarella, basil, cannellini beans and baby plum tomatoes
98. Thai style – caramelised in coconut water
99. With escabeche
100. In a curry puff
101. With brown rice and dried seaweed – wakame or nori
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