Impress Guests With A Sophisticated Tinned Fish Charcuterie Board

Entertaining is all about excitement. It's about creating a bit of magic, conjuring novel delights, and impressing your guests. Proper entertaining creates occasions that turn things like vodka butter from worrisome adaptation to memorable lark. Unless you are hosting the reading of a will (or ... especially if you are hosting the reading of a will?), your aim should be to create comfort, but also to titillate. And welcome surprises do just that. A tinned fish platter, for example, is a terrific addition or exchange for the more expected, sometimes boring ingredients on a charcuterie board.

Charcuterie, of course, literally refers to meat: Those beautiful boards fanned with all manner of saucisson secs, pâté, and jambons. But, in recent years, people have begun applying the term to any loosely grouped foodstuffs. We tried to fight it, but as an acquiescence to the neologism, we're gonna dive right into the tinned fish charcuterie board. This version of charcuterie is just as easy to assemble as the accurately named kind, only a little less expected. It's also a little more likely to incorporate allergens, so survey your guests for any potential problems before they arrive. Then get your pull tab finger ready and crank up the can opener: It's tinned fish time.

To be fair, even some of the best tinned fish just isn't going to present like the colorful emojis on your phone. For one, they're not cartoons. Plus, they're long dead and entombed in metal. But there are some obvious, easy ways to dress it all up. When it comes to the canned fish brands worth buying, we are repeat Fishwife customers for the company's notably high quality at first crack. Its packaging is also objectively beautiful. So you can take something like Fishwife's canned smoked salmon, which looks like, you know, canned salmon once opened, whip it up into a more eye-pleasing fishy dip that rivals the crab variety, and serve it in a little ramekin beside its lovely cardboard label repurposed as an ID card. Repeat the repurposing with each tinned fish preparation.

Being that you probably don't want to serve only dips alone, though, whole anchovies in oil with fresh sourdough slices also amounts to a winning presentation. Caviar in a small, beautiful bowl over ice with a complement of mother of pearl spoons will tickle fish egg lovers everywhere. Pressing a bit of tuna into onigiri keeps with the elegant theme, too. Tinned octopus also plates surprisingly well with little more than a few lemon wedges. And Fishwife itself recommends what it calls a snackerel plate, which marries crackers and crudités with the very seafood from whence this portmanteau caught its name for a much simpler snack-sized version of a tinned fish charcuterie board.