MrTinned Report, Issue 15, Saturday, 22 August 2026

Two tins on a shelf, the same word across the front of both, and two different fish inside them. The front of a tin is a name and it is built to be read at arm's length. Everything that separates those two tins is somewhere else on the can, in the smallest type on it, written to a standard, in a language that belongs to the trade rather than to the person standing in the shop. It is worth learning, because nothing is being hidden. The trade is just talking amongst itself.

Start with the word, because the law reached the front of the tin first. In Europe, sardines belongs to one animal, Sardina pilchardus, the fish that runs up the Atlantic from Morocco to Biscay, and nothing else may be sold under that word on its own. Twenty-one other species are allowed to borrow it, herrings and sprats and several sardinellas, three anchovies off the Pacific coast of the Americas, and the price of borrowing is that they carry their scientific name and the sea they came out of in the same breath. So when a tin says sardines, Sprattus sprattus, North Atlantic, the Latin is not decoration. It is a sprat, and it has been made to say so.

A few tins along, where the shellfish are, the disclosure goes numerical. Somewhere near the weight on a Galician mussel or cockle tin there is a pair of figures, 8/10, or 25/35, and that is simply how many animals are inside. It is the grading system of the Spanish shellfish trade compressed into two digits, because fewer pieces means bigger pieces and bigger pieces cost more. The arithmetic is one division. Drained weight over count gives you the weight of a single mussel, and a Spanish quality order from 1985 does that sum and turns the answer into a word, so over seven and a half grams is grande, over five and a half is mediano, and under that it is pequeño. The strange part is which half a packer owes you. The word is compulsory. The count that lets you check the word is optional, and it tends to get printed by the houses that like the answer.

Weight comes in two versions on any tin and only one of them is fish. Net weight is everything sealed inside, fish and oil and sauce together. Drained weight is what is left when the liquid has gone, and it is the number that says what you are actually buying. There is a floor underneath it too, which is more than most people expect of a label: preserved sardines have to be at least seventy percent fish by net weight in oil, brine, water or a marinade, and at least sixty-five percent when the medium is tomato. Somebody sat down and set the minimum quantity of fish permitted in a tin of fish.

What a can is excused from is the fish's address. Buy a fresh fillet, or a smoked one, or anchovies packed in salt, and the label owes you the catch area and the class of gear that took them, the FAO zone and the net or the line. Put those same anchovies into a tin of oil and the obligation disappears, because a canned fish and a cured one sit in different chapters of the customs code and only one of those chapters carries the catch area. What survives is the country where the tin was last substantially worked, which is how a Moroccan sardine arrives on a European shelf under a European name, as Issue 12 kept finding.

And then there is the oval, the smallest mark on the whole can. Two letters for the country, a number for the building, EC or EU around the edge. That number is the approval issued to one particular establishment, and the register of those approvals is public, so it can be typed into the Commission's own database, which hands back the company and the town where the tin was sealed even when the front of the pack names nobody at all. The lot number a centimetre away does the reverse. It starts with an L, it is left entirely to the packer, who can encode a date or a line or a shift or nothing anybody else could follow, and who is obliged to keep the key rather than share it. One of them is a locked drawer. The other is an open door.

None of that info was addressed to you. The count is a fish merchant's grade, the seventy percent is an inspector's threshold, the oval is a licence number, and all of it was printed for somebody else's purposes and then sent out into the world on the side of a tin. Turn one over in the shop and you are reading the fish's own paperwork that will tell you where it has been travelling.

The oldest whitefish boat on Lake Superior, and the tin at the end of it.

Issue 8 met this house a year and a half into its life, when Marissa Fellows had moved home from a Boston wine bar to put a Great Lakes fish in a tin because nobody else had. The fish in that first run came out of Lake Erie and was processed in Ontario. It does not any more. The whitefish now comes from VanLandschoot and Sons of Munising, a fifth-generation family fishery that has worked the same water since 1914 and is one of two state-licensed operations left on all of Lake Superior.

The family came from Knokke in Belgium in 1906 and started fishing out of Gladstone eight years later, moving up to Munising Bay in 1942. The part worth knowing is what they did in 1965. Expecting gill nets to be banned on the lakes, Jerome VanLandschoot designed a replacement, and he and his son sat and hand-tied thousands of knots to build the prototype, then tested it in AuTrain Bay. That was the trap net, and it is still how the fish in this tin is caught, off Munising Bay and out towards Copper Harbor on the Keweenaw.

The fish is cold-smoked rather than hot, which keeps it mild and holds it together, and it is packed in organic sunflower oil with sea salt and a garlic and shallot cure. It is a gentler, sweeter, lake-tasting thing than the Atlantic and Mediterranean tins around it. Eat it on toast, or flake it over a boiled potato with some of the oil.

$15.99 at FishNook, $18.00 at DECANT Napa, $18.95 at Surfas Online, or $45 for a three-pack direct from Great Lakes.