Tiny oily fish whose name may remember Sardinia
Sardine and pilchard label assorted small oily forage fishes in the herring group Clupeoidei. Meanings shift by region—the UK Sea Fish Industry Authority draws its own size lines. English borrowed sardine in the fifteenth century from French, Latin sardina, and Greek; Aristotle's sardinos is already quoted by Athenaeus.
Neither sardine nor pilchard is a precise label. Britain's Sea Fish Industry Authority treats sardines as young pilchards, one rule of thumb calls fish under 15 centimetres sardines and anything bigger pilchards, and the international Codex standard for canned sardines accepts 21 species. The European pilchard is the true sardine, while Japanese, southern African and South American pilchards belong to Sardinops; sprats, such as the brisling sold as sardines, are impostors. The English word arrived in the fifteenth century from French and Latin, ultimately from Greek, perhaps honouring Sardinia, though scholars doubt Aristotle's Athens bought fish from an island over 1,000 kilometres away. Another theory links the name to the reddish flesh, like sardonyx stone from Lydian Sardis.
The fish eat almost nothing but zooplankton, gathering wherever it blooms. Fishers usually surround schools with purse seines or steer them into coastal weirs of stakes, working mainly at night when sardines rise to feed. The catch goes to bait, fresh food, drying, salting, smoking and reduction into meal and oil; sardine oil has gone into paint, varnish and linoleum, and Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany turned hydrogenated sardine oil into nitroglycerin for explosives. As of 2020, around 70 percent of Japan's sardines went to non-food uses such as fertiliser and fish feed.
Canned sardines are about 21 percent protein and 10 percent fat, supplying 185 calories per 100 grams along with nearly four times the daily value of vitamin B12. Feeding low in the food chain, they carry less mercury than many popular fish and generate relatively few greenhouse gases.
Cornwall's pilchard trade boomed from about 1750 to 1880; catches swung from 47,000 hogsheads in 1871 to under 9,500 in 1877, each cask packing 2,300 to 4,000 fish. Much went to Catholic Europe, inspiring a toast wishing the Pope a longer Lent. Cornish sardines have held EU protected status since 2010, and Newlyn School painters such as Stanhope Forbes depicted the industry.
Source: Sardine
