Sardines

By CLARKE CANFIELD, Associated Press Writer Clarke Canfield, Associated Press Writer – Wed Apr 14, 1:56 pm ET



PROSPECT HARBOR, Maine – The intensely fishy smell of sardines has been the smell of money for generations of workers in Maine who have snipped, sliced and packed small, silvery fish into billions of cans on their way to Americans' lunch buckets and kitchen cabinets.
For the past 135 years, sardine canneries have been as much a part of Maine's small coastal villages as the thick Down East fog. It's been estimated that more than 400 canneries have come and gone along the state's long, jagged coast.
The lone survivor, the Stinson Seafood plant here in this eastern Maine shoreside town, shuts down this week after a century in operation. It is the last sardine cannery not just in Maine, but in the United States.

"It just doesn't seem possible this is the end," Anderson lamented last week while taking a break at the plant where she's worked for 54 years. She and nearly 130 co-workers will lose their jobs.

Once considered an imported delicacy, sardines now have a humble reputation. They aren't one species of fish. Instead, sardines are any of dozens of small, oily, cold-water fish that are part of the herring family that are sold in tightly packed cans.
The first U.S. sardine cannery opened in Maine in 1875, when a New York businessman set up the Eagle Preserved Fish Co. in Eastport.

Ronnie Peabody, who runs the Maine Coast Sardine History Museum in the town of Jonesport 35 miles up the road from the Stinson plant, has a cookbook published in 1950 called "58 Ways to Serve Sardines." It includes recipes for sardine soup, sardine casserole, baked eggs and sardines, and creamed sardines and spinach.


*Another one bites the dust, and that's just sad.  I remember my brothers eatting those things when we were little kids.  My mom would come home from the grocery store, and they would crab a can or two and off they'd go the the park across the street and gobble them up.  Think about the design of the can itself, with that little key you would use to unwind the lid.  Guess you could say they don't make things like they used too, and aren't going to anymore from the looks of it. 

Let's all bow our heads in a moment of silence for the loss of yet another  American company.