It was the best fish supper they had ever tasted

[venta]

This evening, in between all the stuff I needed to get done, I had grilled sardines for tea. They're a bit fiddly for a hasty tea, but today seemed like a good day because my vegetarian housemate would be out. Not that she's ever complained about such things, but I do tend to feel that if I'm going to be doing serious rending of whole animals, it's more polite to try and rend quietly by myself.

For those people who've never bought sardines, they're sold whole - really whole. Unlike most fish, they haven't been slit up the belly and gutted. All recipes seem to advocate slitting them open before grilling, but no one explicitly suggests removing the guts.

It seemed kind of wrong not to, so I scraped the gooey bits out. Some helpful chap from the BBC recommends:

"Press down along the backbone of the fish, turn over, then carefully remove the backbone from the sardines, cutting off the bone just before the tail."

Yeah, right. I bet he's the sort of guy who would say things like "simply give the pill to the cat". I tried the above. The first one went monumentally wrong, the second slightly better (suggesting that, so long as I don't mind eating butchered sardines regularly, I could become proficient).

Even so, the finished product still contained a million tiny, hair-like bones. And some bone-like ones as well. Now, I'm aware that the correct answer is that it doesn't matter, you can eat them perfectly safely. But I very much dislike the occasional crunchy bits, I don't like it when they stick in your gums, and I don't like the look of it. Plus after some nasty experiences in restaurants with both sardines and whitebait where my mouth swelled up, I'm unkeen to eat the non-safe-fish bits.

So: is it possible to fillet sardines effectively ? Is it possible to get all the bones out ? Is there a way of eating them which makes removal of most of the bones easier ? With most fish I'd only try and get the bones out post-cooking, with the skeleton whole, would that work better here ? Should I just give up and get a nice bit of plaice instead ?

Comments

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

Gut 'em (and chop the head and tail off if you're so inclined, but they do help everything hold together) before cooking - but all the actual pulling of fish off the bones is far easier done on the plate...it's easier to 'comb' mouthfuls of fish off a backbone, leaving the bones attached to it, than it is to pull a backbone out of a fish & leave it in neat fillets.

Of course, this logic only really applies to small fish like sardines - if you want to split bigger fish between people's plates, then filleting does become more necessary. At this point, buying from a fish counter or fishmonger is really useful, because you can ask them to do it for you before you buy (although they will sell you the fish according to how much it weighed before it was filleted...)