Pilchard

No fish is more bound up with Cornwall than the pilchard. For three hundred years the shoals were the making of these villages: salted by the ton in stone cellars and shipped to Italy by the barrel, they paid the rent up and down the coast. The trade collapsed, the name fell out of fashion, and then somebody rebranded them Cornish sardines and the whole thing came roaring back. Same fish, rich and oily and savoury, just with its confidence restored.

What is a pilchard? The quick answer

A pilchard is a small, oily, silver fish of the herring family, Latin name Sardina pilchardus, and it is the same species as the sardine. In the UK the young, small fish are usually sold as sardines and the larger, mature fish as pilchards, so a young pilchard is simply a sardine. The fresh Cornish sardines on a fishmonger's slab are pilchards landed young, and in Cornwall the two names have been swapped back and forth for generations.

Pilchard or sardine: is there any difference?

Not in the sea. Fresh European pilchards and sardines are one species; what changes is the size of the fish and the name the seller chooses. There is no fixed length at which a sardine becomes a pilchard, it is a market habit rather than a rule. Tins are a different story. Many tins sold as pilchards in UK shops contain a close relative, Sardinops sagax, rather than the European fish, and the label does not always name the species. They taste much the same, rich and savoury; tinned pilchards tend to be bigger and are often packed in tomato sauce, while tinned sardines are smaller and more often in oil.

How to spot it

A pilchard is a small, neat oily fish with the streamlined herring build of the clupeid family. The flank is bright silver, almost like polished metal, under a darker blue-green back, and the tail finishes in a deep, decisive fork. It is shaped for speed and not much else. The catch is the name: pilchard and sardine are one and the same. The small, young fish go to market as sardines; the bigger, mature ones get called pilchards. A few centimetres of growth, a different word entirely.

Where it lives

Pilchards live in crowds, moving in huge shoals that gather along the Cornish coast through the warmer months. Summer is the time, when the sea warms and the shoals press in close to shore and stack up in numbers. Their day has a rhythm worth learning: after dark they rise to feed near the surface, then sink to deeper, safer water once the light comes up. That nightly lift and drop governs when they show inshore and when you stand a chance of finding them.

Catching it

Pilchards come to small herring rigs, those strings of feathered or shiny hooks meant to look like a scatter of baitfish. Find a feeding shoal and work the rig through it with a slow, even retrieve so the hooks flicker like fleeing baitfish. Timing beats everything here: fish the surface as the light fades and the shoals lift, and your odds climb sharply. They travel in such numbers that it is easy to fill a bucket without meaning to, so only keep what you will eat and leave the rest to hold the shoal together.

In the kitchen

Forget anything gentle. Pilchards want fierce heat and smoke. Get a griddle or the barbecue properly hot, slash the flanks twice on each side, rub in coarse salt and lay them on until the skin chars and crackles, three or four minutes a side, no turning about. That char against the oily flesh is the whole point. For a Cornish sardines recipe that earns its keep, scatter over chopped chilli, garlic and parsley and finish with a hard squeeze of lemon to cut the richness. For hot smoking, follow a tested recipe and check the food is cooked through. Salting and hot smoking are different processes; salt alone does not cook fish. Either way, go bold and do not be shy with the fire.

Young pilchards: why they are sold as sardines

Small fish are tender, cook in minutes and fit neatly on a plate or in a tin, so that is what most buyers ask for, and they have long been marketed as sardines. When Cornish merchants began selling their young pilchards as Cornish sardines, the name took off, and Cornish Sardines now has protected geographical status. So if a recipe calls for sardines and your fishmonger has pilchards, use them: bigger fish just need an extra minute or two on the grill.

How to prepare fresh pilchards

Pilchards have loose, soft scales. Rub them off under cold running water with your thumb or the back of a knife, working from tail to head. To gut one, slit the belly from the vent to the head, pull out the insides and rinse the cavity; our gutting guide shows the same method on a mackerel. For boneless fillets, take off the head, open the fish out flat skin-side up, press firmly along the backbone with your thumb, then turn it over and lift the spine away from the tail end. Cook them the day you buy them if you can, and keep them in the fridge until then.

Are pilchards good for you?

They are an oily fish, so they are a good source of omega-3 fats, protein and vitamin D. The NHS advises eating at least two portions of fish a week, one of them oily. It also sets upper limits on oily fish for some people, including girls and women who are pregnant or could become pregnant, so check the NHS fish guidance if that applies to you. Tinned pilchards and sardines eaten with their soft bones also provide calcium.