21 Jul 2026
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, celebrates the sardines which made up her wedding meal…
I don’t know which was the greater inspiration for my recent bout of sardine-scoffing, my friend’s detailed relaying of her trip to Sardinia (whence it is probable the name derives) or our recent attendance at an Alanis Morissette concert, where we were packed in like them.
Both, in truth, served as reminders of this tasty little fish that inhabits a nostalgic corner of my heart, having been part of our wedding meal.
Some 18 years ago (I’ve checked my maths and somehow it really has been that long), we made every effort to make our wedding as unfancy as possible, but at the same time wanted the meal to be really delicious, so we took our 45 guests to Café du Marché next to Smithfields market in Farringdon and took over their upper floor. The décor, atmosphere and menu were all unpretentious (tick) and lovely (tick), making it the perfect place for our celebration.
Guests could pre-order from a choice of three starters, four mains and three desserts, which was important to us because we wanted the meal to be as far from the get-what-you’re-given wedding fare as possible, which – back then – was invariably some kind of goat’s cheese starter and a Parma-ham-wrapped chicken breast for main.
Sardines come into season in July in the UK and I remember how fresh the grilled sardines were – brought fresh from Cornwall that day – and the following week my husband and I travelled back down for our honeymoon (no trips to the tropics for us – we opted for somewhere local and you can’t imagine my delight when we discovered it was to be the wettest summer in Cornwall for a century).
The Café du Marché served the sardines with a sauce verte (a French version of a salsa verde that replaces anchovies with capers and I think the restaurant added lemon zest too) and the grassy, herby acidity really cut through the oily fish. It was heaven on a plate, despite having once been deemed a peasant’s dish.
The low cost of sardines, in fact, is one of the biggest reasons to buy them.
Compared with more sought-after fish like salmon or hake, it’s a steal.
Perhaps the greatest deterrents is their many tiny bones, but they can be bought already filleted, which makes life quite a lot easier.
If you buy tinned sardines, the bones are left in and, on account of having been pressure-cooked, are soft enough to eat. The collagen and calcium alone – to say nothing of the omega-3s – make a weekly tin of sardines a must.
Other benefits include the sustainability of sardines: they have a low carbon footprint, being fishable off the UK shoreline, and there are healthy stocks of them in our waters. They are the fishy ‘triple threat’: better for the planet, the body and the bank balance.
The other day, browsing the fish counter of my local supermarket, my eye was drawn to the nearby shelf displaying packs of sardine fillets all neatly trimmed and deboned. They looked too good to pass by; I bought several.
Once home, without even waiting for a meal time, so eager was I to cook them, I laid them out neatly on an oiled wire rack, brushed them with olive oil and put them under the grill with no adornments or seasoning.
All the flavour would come in the plating (and from the fish itself, of course).
I cut myself a couple of thick slices of sourdough, toasted them under the grill once I’d taken the rack of sardines out, then rubbed the slices with a raw clove of garlic.
Next, I placed my sardine fillets on the toast and sprinkled with salt and black pepper. Next, I added some of the juiciest cherry tomatoes I could find (quartered), a squeeze of lemon and some fresh parsley.
That is all I did; the dish was pure simplicity, perhaps in unconscious homage to the low-key wedding so many years earlier.
But probably more because sardines are so feistily flavoured (and I hope the alliteration excuses my inventing words) that simple garnishes are truly all that are needed.
The sweetness of tomatoes, the peppery zing of parsley… those peasants really did know how to eat.
