We have Napoleon to thank. You can draw a straight line from his 1809 contest for French inventors to develop a method to preserve food for his increasingly distant armies and the cheap tinned sardines on toast any child of the 70s remembers as their least appetising dinner in straitened economic times.
Quite what Bonaparte, or indeed my childhood self, would make of a man in a fez sitting alongside his dog, also wearing a fez, opening a small tin of smoked eel fillets costing €34.40 while being watched by a social media audience of 60 million people, is anyone’s guess.
Marcus “let us decant the tin” Ansell is a big part of why tinned fish is joining fine wine, hi-fidelity vinyl, small batch coffee and Japanese selvedge denim as the next object of 21st-century obsessive connoisseurship.
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Marcus and his dog King Arthur have been reviewing tinned fish from their home in Nottinghamshire since 2024. Beginning as a hobby, @tinnedfishreviews is now a full-time job. His laconic murmurings of appreciation have encouraged many, myself included, to overcome unhappy memories of being force-fed 25p tins of sardines in tomato sauce, and embrace a new world of culinary delight and artistic beauty.
Its idiosyncratic design aesthetic, most notably the Portuguese and Spanish, but increasingly brands from Cornwall and the US, is certainly part of the tinned-fish revival, as you can see from this fine selection of packaging.
Ansell’s passion for tinned fish was partly facilitated by an enterprising scouser, Patrick Martinez, who, in 2018, brought two suitcases full of tinned fish back from a holiday in Portugal and today runs a specialist import business, thetinnedfishmarket.com, complete with a stall in the sanctum sanctorum of British foodies, London’s Borough Market.
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His range is as far removed from the ubiquitous John West sardine as you can imagine; flash-grilled salmon from the Faroes, octopus in paprika sauce from Galicia, hake in salsa verde from Cantabria, monkfish liver from Iceland, sardines from Brittany in a tangy kumquat and green pepper sauce. The prices are far removed too; anything from a fiver to £60 (for a large tin of white tuna).
The obscurity of the product combined with its romantic packaging and the undoubted health benefits of all that omega 3 have created a subculture all of its own.
Tinned fish parties featuring “seacuterie” boards are now all the rage, particularly amongst a hip demographic who consider arguments over the best small-batch coffee roaster to be very much 2025.
This is 2026, and it’s all about the tinned fish, which – and this is surely no coincidence – has the added benefit of exceptionally long storage potential at a time of great global uncertainty.
After all, when the time comes to cower in whatever shelter we can scramble to, what better distraction from the apocalypse than decanting that $36 tin of Alaskan buttered cod cheeks you tucked away for a special occasion?
