Shiver me tin-bers...

 Avast, ye land-lubbers! Don't be hangin' the jib there - let's splice the mainbrace! Fill yer cup with grog, and join me in a shanty, for this day be the finest day in all the year - arrrr, that's right, it be time for scurvy folk across all the seven seas to talk like a pirate once again!

Or at least it was, when I started work on this post on 19th September - International Talk Like A Pirate Day. But that's already a whole month ago, so the day is but a distant memory I'm afraid. But never ye mind - you can talk like a pirate on whatever day you want to really - and perhaps should be encouraged to, much in the same way that pancakes shouldn't be restricted just to Pancake Day - they're far too tasty for that. But it's nice to be reminded, and join with others to do so once a year, at the very least.

We can do better than just talk like pirates though - dressing and drinking like them are actively encouraged on 19th September too. If ever there was a time to get out the bandanas and stripy shirts from the back of the cupboard, and pour yourself a tot or two of rum, this is it. As for eating like pirates though, maybe not so much. In the golden age of piracy, at a time when preserving food for long voyages was largely limited to drying and salting, even your average sailor in the navy could expect little more than weeks and months of hard, dry ships' biscuits and heavily salted or dried beef, with the lack of vitamins making scurvy and poor health a constant worry. The food aboard a pirate ship could well have made that seem like luxury. Sticking to rum was probably wise.

While this was a time well before the development of canning, my pirate-themed meal was, naturally, tin-based - with this 'Pirat' brand tin of fish that I had found in a Polish supermarket a while ago. Speaking not a single word of Polish, I had no real idea of what I was buying - I couldn't even be 100% sure it was a tin of fish, though the flat shape, as well as its position alongside other more obviously fishy specimens on the supermarket shelf, suggested that was the case, and I was keen to give it a go whatever.

A quick use of Google Translate later revealed that "Śledź po gdańsku w oleju" is herring in oil 'Gdansk style'. No indication as to what exactly the style might be in Gdansk, but from the ingredients it appears to be just Baltic herring, rapeseed oil, salt, and acetic acid as an acidity regulator. I wondered if the text on the back of the tin might shed any more light on the subject, but it proved to be far more interesting than that, not about fish, but pirates:

"Do you know why pirates wore eyepatches? Adapting eyesight to changing lighting conditions takes a long time, and in the pirate's profession, even a few seconds of poor vision could end badly. There was a solution: to shorten this process, pirates changed the eyepatch from one eye to the other. The eye that was covered up until now was already adapted to the dark, so the pirate did not have to waste time groping to draw his sabre."

Whoever wrote that really saved the best until last, didn't they? "Groping to draw his sabre" seems to come out of nowhere, but really is a fabulous image. Anyway - back to the fish. 

On opening the tin, I was surprised to find that there were just two pieces, albeit quite large ones, but with plenty of space around them - not packed in like sardines by any means. Aside from the head, tail fins and innards though, these were basically two whole fish, which you don't tend to see in tins from the UK. Some people get freaked out by even the slightest bit of skin and bone in a tin of salmon; here, you pretty much get the lot. Opening one out on a chopping board revealed the spine running down the middle - not quite as soft as the bones of some tinned fish, but still very much edible. The flesh itself was firm, breaking off into almost meaty chunks, but with the strong, punchy flavour of a good oily fish.

Just having these with some good bread would have made an excellent meal, but I felt I should probably do something a bit more piratical with them. So I decided to make fishcakes, breaking the fish up into chunks and combining with some mashed potato, a grating of horseradish, and a smidge of mayonnaise and some flour to help bind them. 

What have fishcakes got to do with pirates? Well, if you shape them in a certain way...

...and then add a few bits of veg for decoration...

...you've made yourself some fish-skulls! 

And once fried in a hot pan for a few minutes on each side, if you combine them with some of the bones that you've saved, you've got a skull and crossbones almost worthy of a Jolly Roger! 

Take care if using the oil from the tin to cook the skulls in though - I let mine get a bit too hot, and it suddenly (but briefly) ignited quite dramatically, possibly as a result of the acetic acid acting like water in a chip-pan fire. That's not why the one above is looking a little charred though - I just left him face-down in the pan for too long. Unfortunately I hadn't saved the bones from both fish, so the other one had to be a skull and crossbeans instead.

But arr, there you have it, me hearties - a dish from a tin, fit for a pirate king! Only the best for the captain's table! (Or was that what Captain Birdseye used to say about his fish fingers? I'm not sure he'd want to be associated with pirates - he was an honourable naval man to the core.) I would say these could be a good way to get fussy children to eat fish, but I'll admit these could be slightly terrifying for younger kids - you don't want to shiver their timbers too much, or you might put them off fish for life. And possibly pirates, too. But if you get them involved in decorating the skull faces, rather than just shoving a plate in front of them, maybe they'd enjoy them. Fish-skulls might be quite good fun for Halloween too, which due to the delay in my finishing this post is now just round the corner. Sometimes a Captain Jack Sparrow-esque level of laziness does pay off...