Barbecued sardines

Sardines may be one of the most under-appreciated foods the world's oceans have to offer. Saveur

Two of our fellow guests here in beautiful Narbonne, yesterday went off on their own to a little seaside village called Mèze where they bought some sardines. To be fair they did phone us beforehand to make sure that this was a good plan - which it was because we had decided to eat in and it was barbecue weather. Gas barbecue though. I'm sure it would have been better over charcoal and I could have found some rather better quotes about properly barbecued sardines but we had to make do with gas. And above is the result - which was perfectly delicious. Though there are a lot of little bones I suppose.

I've gone on about sardines before, so I won't repeat all the stuff about what kind of fish it is, etc. Suffice to say that even though ours were very simply cooked - I think with just oil, salt and dried parsley. (An aside: Who on earth uses dried parsley? - well tourists in rented houses where there is no parsley in the garden, we have not bought any in the supermarket and it happens to be virtually the only spice available in the store cupboard in the house, other than the inevitable herbes de Provence - and, in this case, some dried tarragon.) And it was served with lemon wedges and beautiful French baguettes. It was extremely yummy.

Another interesting thing I learnt from our fellow guests who visit Spain frequently - you actually don't have to gut them but can cook them without cleaning them. I confess I was not up to this - I had mine gutted, but it was interesting to learn that the Spanish don't bother. Not sure whether they ate the innards or not - I didn't look! But I'm guessing that the Spanish probably do. It seems like something they would do - which is very possibly a racist comment.

All my favourite cooks wax lyrical about barbecued - or even grilled sardines - and they are indeed, usually cheap. They sometimes even wax lyrical about my favourite tinned sardines and have all sorts of interesting suggestions as to what to do with them.

But going back to gutting them. Mostly you either buy them gutted or you gut them yourself - and it really isn't difficult or too awful, but it is tedious. And it's always best to buy them as close to the boat that brought them in as possible!

And going back to my favourite cooks - well just google their names and grilled sardines and you will get a plethora of recipes ranging from the supremely simple - oil, salt and lemon, to the complex - various spice rubs and marinades. You could have wonderful fun devising such things. But I suspect that simple is best because the fish itself is so tasty.