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Recipes with sardines

4 recipes that use sardines, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Sardalya sarma, takes 28 minutes. It is most often cooked with lemon, pine nuts and plain flour.

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Sardines stuffed with chermoula

Walk past the fish stalls by Essaouira's harbour and you smell this before you see it: sardines opened flat, smeared with a green-red paste of herbs, garlic, cumin and paprika, pressed together in pairs, dusted with flour and fried until the edges crunch. The fish stays moist and rich inside, sharpened by lemon and a little chilli. In Safi and Agadir homes they appear at lunch with a tomato and onion salad and bread, or tucked into sandwiches from street carts. Chef's tip: ask the fishmonger to butterfly the sardines and remove the backbone; it saves a fiddly 20 minutes and they lie flat.

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Sardalya sarma

In Ayvalık and on Cunda island, early autumn sardines are wrapped in salted vine leaves and grilled over charcoal, a trick that keeps the oily little fish moist and lets the leaves char and crackle. You peel back the leaf, or eat it too, and finish each with lemon and a drop of olive oil. Serve with a tomato and onion salad and bread. Chef's tip: rinse brined vine leaves well; they already carry salt, so the sardines need only a pinch.

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Sarde in saor

Sarde in saor began as food for Venetian sailors, since the vinegar kept the fish for days, and it is still the dish of the Festa del Redentore in July, when families eat it on boats under the fireworks. Floured, fried sardines are layered with onions stewed slowly in oil and vinegar, plump raisins and toasted pine nuts, then left to marinate in the fridge for a day so the flavours soften and mingle. The result is sweet, sharp and rich all at once. Serve it cool as a starter or in the cicchetti bars' way, on slices of grilled polenta. Chef's tip: make it at least a day ahead; eaten the same day the vinegar is harsh, but after 24 hours it mellows beautifully.

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Pasta con le sarde

Sweet, salty and grassy all at once, Palermo's favourite pasta carries the island's history in one pan: Arab raisins, pine nuts and saffron meet fresh sardines and the wild fennel that grows on every Sicilian hillside in spring. It is cooked at home and in the city's old trattorie from March to the start of summer, and on 19 March for the feast of San Giuseppe. Instead of cheese, it is finished with olive oil toasted breadcrumbs, the crunchy 'muddica' that Sicilians call poor man's parmesan. Wild fennel is hard to find outside Italy; the fronds from two fennel bulbs plus a few fennel seeds come close. Serve it warm, or at room temperature as Palermitans often do. Chef's tip: blanch the fennel greens in the pasta pot first and cook the bucatini in that same green, aniseed-scented water, so the flavour runs right through the pasta.

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Goes well with sardines