Sardines: History and Origins

The sardine is one of humanity's oldest cheap foods and, improbably, one of its most influential. A small, oily, silver schooling fish of the Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic, it was never farmed and never had a discoverer — it simply ran in vast shoals close to shore, and people who lived beside the sea learned to catch and keep it. This article follows what the documented record actually supports: where the name "sardine" came from and why its link to the island of Sardinia is more tradition than proven fact; how ancient Greeks and Romans ate and salted small pilchard-type fish, even fermenting them into the famous sauce garum; how the sardine fed the poor for centuries; and, above all, how a French confectioner's preservation method gave birth, in the 1820s, to the canned sardine — an industry that spread from Nantes to Portugal, Spain, and the canneries of Monterey, California, before the great Pacific sardine collapse closed that final chapter. Where the record is firm we say so; where a story is a popular tradition — like the "Sardinia" etymology or the named "inventor" of the oil-packed sardine — we name it as such.

Table of Contents

  1. A Small Fish With Many Names
  2. The Name and the Sardinia Question
  3. Ancient Mediterranean Fisheries
  4. Garum and the Roman Salt-Fish Industry
  5. The Poor Man's Protein
  6. Appert, Colin, and the Birth of the Canned Sardine
  7. Iberia, California, and the Global Cannery
  8. Cannery Row and the Pacific Collapse
  9. The Sardine Today
  10. Research Papers and References
  11. Connections

A Small Fish With Many Names

"Sardine" is not the name of a single species but a loose label shared by several small, oily fish in the herring family (Clupeidae). The most important in the Old World is the European pilchard or European sardine, Sardina pilchardus, which ranges from the eastern Atlantic off Norway down past Iberia and throughout the Mediterranean. In the Pacific, the name attaches to the Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax), and elsewhere to various species in genera such as Sardinella. They are all open-water schooling fish that gather in immense, shimmering shoals close to shore.

To confuse matters, "sardine" and "pilchard" are often two names for the same animal at different stages of life. A common rule of thumb — used by the UK's fish-industry authorities among others — holds that fish under about 15 cm (6 inches) are called sardines, and larger individuals of the same species are called pilchards. The young, small fish were what got packed into tins, which is why the little canned fish became universally known as the sardine even where the adult is sold as a pilchard.

The one biological fact that drives this whole history is the same one that shaped the herring: sardines arrive in enormous, seasonal shoals, then disappear, and once caught they spoil very quickly. The story of the sardine is therefore really the story of how people learned to preserve a sudden glut of cheap protein — first by salting and fermenting, and finally, two centuries ago, by sealing it in a tin.

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The Name and the Sardinia Question

The English word sardine arrived in the fifteenth century by way of Old French sardine, from Latin sardina, which in turn comes from the Ancient Greek σαρδίνη (sardinē) or σαρδι̂νος (sardinos). The Greek naturalist record is old: Aristotle, quoted later by Athenaeus, already used a word for a sardine-or-pilchard-type fish, so the Greeks plainly knew the animal.

The most familiar explanation — repeated in countless cookbooks — is that the fish is named after the island of Sardinia, around whose waters sardines were supposedly once especially abundant, deriving the Greek term from Σαρδώ (Sardō), the Greek name for the island. This is best treated as the traditional explanation rather than established fact. Etymologists have long flagged it as doubtful: Sardinia lies more than 1,000 km from Athens, and it seems hardly probable that early Greeks were naming a common local fish after a distant island they would not normally have drawn their catch from. (Bronze-Age Mycenaean trade with Sardinia did exist, which keeps the idea alive, but does not prove it.)

A competing theory ties the name not to the island but to a colour. The flesh of some sardines is a reddish-brown reminiscent of the gemstones sard and sardonyx, whose names come from a Greek root meaning "red" — and possibly from Sardis, the capital of ancient Lydia in what is now western Turkey. On this reading the fish and the island might share a colour-word root rather than the fish being named for the island at all. The honest position is that the "Sardinia" story is a long-standing popular etymology that may well be true but is not securely documented, and a credible rival explanation exists.

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Ancient Mediterranean Fisheries

Small clupeid fish like the sardine have been caught and eaten around the Mediterranean since deep antiquity. Because the bones are tiny and fragile, the archaeological picture for the earliest periods is fragmentary, but the broad fact is not in doubt: coastal Greek, Phoenician, and later Roman communities fished inshore waters for abundant small fish, of which sardines and anchovies were among the most plentiful. These were a food of the many, not the few — caught in seine and beach nets, eaten fresh when the shoals ran, and salted to last when they were gone.

The classical Mediterranean already understood the central problem of an oily fish: it rots fast in the heat. The answer, then as for two thousand years afterward, was salt. Salt-fish (Latin salsamentum) was a major trade commodity of the Greek and Roman worlds, moving in jars and barrels far from the coast, and small fish such as sardines and anchovies were a staple of that trade. A salted sardine could feed a labourer or a soldier hundreds of miles inland, long after the living shoal had vanished.

Modern science has begun to read this ancient fishery directly from the fish. A 2025 study recovered ancient DNA from fish-bone remains in a Roman fish-salting vat at the Adro Vello site in northwestern Spain and confirmed that the European sardine (Sardina pilchardus) was being processed there in Roman times — and that the local sardine population shows continuity with the fish in those waters today. It is a striking link: the very species in a modern tin of Portuguese or Spanish sardines is the same one Roman workers were salting two millennia ago.

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Garum and the Roman Salt-Fish Industry

No account of the ancient sardine is complete without garum, the fermented fish sauce that the Romans poured over much of their food the way modern cooks reach for salt or soy sauce. Garum and its relatives (such as liquamen) were made by layering small whole fish — and often fish guts — with large amounts of salt and leaving the mixture to ferment in vats in the sun for weeks or months. The enzymes and salt broke the fish down into a clear, intensely savoury, glutamate-rich liquid that was prized across the empire.

The fish that went into garum were precisely the cheap, abundant shoaling species: anchovies, mackerel, picarel, and sardines. The 2025 ancient-DNA work mentioned above is important here too, because the Roman vat it sampled was a garum-type salting installation — direct molecular evidence that the European sardine was among the species fermented into Roman fish sauce. This squares with the wider archaeological record of cetariae, the industrial fish-salting and garum factories whose stone vats still scar the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and North Africa.

Garum mattered for this history because it shows that, two thousand years before the tin can, the Mediterranean had already built a large, organised industry around preserving small oily fish. The technology was salt and fermentation rather than heat and metal, but the economic logic was identical to the modern cannery: take a fish too perishable and too cheap to be worth much fresh, transform it into something stable and valuable, and ship it across the known world.

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The Poor Man's Protein

Through the medieval and early-modern centuries the sardine kept the role it had held in antiquity: cheap, abundant, working-class food. Along the coasts of Portugal, Spain, France's Brittany and Bay of Biscay, Italy, and the wider Mediterranean, sardine fishing was a mainstay of small coastal communities. The fish were caught fresh in season, grilled over open fires — the smell of grilling sardines is still inseparable from summer festivals in Portugal — and salted or pressed in oil and brine to keep through the lean months.

Because sardines were plentiful and inexpensive, they rarely appear in the grand culinary records that tracked luxury foods; their history is the quieter one of everyday subsistence. Yet that very cheapness made them enormously important. A coastal family with access to a sardine run had a dependable source of protein, fat, and (though no one yet understood the chemistry) the nutrients we now associate with oily fish. For the poor of the Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboards, the sardine was often the difference between an adequate diet and a meagre one.

This is the social backdrop against which the canning revolution must be understood. When a way was finally found to seal sardines in a tin, it did not create a new luxury so much as turn an old, perishable, intensely local food into one that could travel anywhere and keep for years — carrying cheap, nourishing protein far inland and, eventually, around the globe.

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Appert, Colin, and the Birth of the Canned Sardine

The story of the modern sardine turns on one invention. In the first decade of the nineteenth century the French confectioner Nicolas Appert (1749–1841) worked out that food sealed in a container and then heated could be kept for long periods without spoiling. The French state, desperate to feed Napoleon's armies and navy, had offered a prize for a reliable preservation method; in 1810 Appert published his treatise L'Art de conserver les substances animales et végétales describing the technique and received a 12,000-franc award on condition that he make it public. The method — sealing food in airtight glass or metal and heating it — became known as appertization and earned Appert the title "father of food science."

Appert's method met the sardine in the city of Nantes, on France's Atlantic coast, in the 1820s. Here the record needs care, because two members of the same family are involved. The elder Joseph Colin, a Nantes confectioner who died in 1815, had experimented with preserving sardines cooked in butter using Appert-style sealing. It was his son, Pierre-Joseph Colin, who took the decisive step: he replaced the butter with olive oil and, in 1824, established what is generally credited as the first industrial oil-packed sardine cannery, on the rue des Salorges in the Nantes port district, packing the fish in hand-soldered tinned-iron boxes. The product — the sardine in oil sealed in a tin — is often called the first true industrial food.

Popular accounts often compress this story, crediting "Joseph Colin" — or "a friend of Appert named Joseph Colin" — with founding the cannery around 1822. The more precise record attributes the oil-packed innovation and the 1824 factory specifically to the son, Pierre-Joseph Colin, building on his father Joseph's earlier butter experiments and on Appert's method. The attribution is best read as "traditionally credited to the Colin family of Nantes, with the first oil-packed factory generally dated to 1824" rather than a single clean inventor's-eureka moment. What is not in doubt is that the canned sardine was born in Nantes in the 1820s and grew fast: the Colin works are reported to have produced tens of thousands of cans a year by the mid-1830s, rising to roughly 200,000 boxes annually by the late 1830s, and their success spawned dozens of imitating factories along the Breton coast.

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Iberia, California, and the Global Cannery

From Nantes the canned sardine spread quickly. France remained an early centre, with canneries multiplying along the coast of Brittany and the Bay of Biscay as railways let the tins reach inland markets. By the later nineteenth century the industry had leapt the Pyrenees: Portugal and Spain, with their rich Atlantic sardine grounds and abundant cheap labour, became powerhouses of sardine canning. Portuguese ports such as Setúbal, Matosinhos, and Olhão, and the canneries of Galicia and the Spanish Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, turned the tinned sardine into a major export and a symbol of national cuisine — a status the Portuguese conserva still enjoys today.

The canning model also crossed the Atlantic. In the United States the technique was applied first on the Atlantic seaboard — the Maine sardine industry, packing young Atlantic herring, became important in the late nineteenth century — and then, decisively, on the Pacific coast. There the abundant Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) ran in colossal shoals off California, and a fishery and canning industry grew up to exploit it. The undisputed capital of that boom was Monterey, California, where canning began in 1902 when Frank E. Booth established the Monterey Packing Company on the waterfront.

What had begun as a French confectioner's trick for preserving a perishable local fish had, within a century, become a genuinely global industry — from Brittany and Iberia to Maine and California — knitting distant fishing grounds into the world food economy. The same little fish that had fed the Mediterranean poor since antiquity now travelled in tins to kitchens, ships, and armies on every continent.

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Cannery Row and the Pacific Collapse

Monterey's sardine boom became one of the legends of twentieth-century America. The waterfront stretch of Ocean View Avenue filled with canneries and the foul-smelling "reduction" plants that rendered sardines into fishmeal and oil; at its peak in the early 1940s, by various counts more than two dozen canneries and reduction plants crowded the shoreline. The fishery was vast: in the 1936–37 season the California sardine catch ran to hundreds of thousands of tons, and Monterey became one of the busiest fishing ports in the Western Hemisphere. The novelist John Steinbeck, who knew the town and its marine biologists well, immortalised the gritty, vivid world of the canneries in his 1945 novel Cannery Row — and the street was officially renamed Cannery Row in his honour in 1958.

Then the fish vanished. The Pacific sardine catch peaked and crashed within a few years in the 1940s: in the 1946 season the total California sardine catch was on the order of 142,000 tons; a single year later it had collapsed to roughly 27,000 tons, an abrupt fall of around 80 percent. Through the late 1940s and 1950s the fishery never recovered, and the canneries of Monterey closed one after another; the last cannery on the Row finally shut in 1973.

What caused the collapse has been argued ever since, and the honest answer is both overfishing and nature. The Pacific sardine population swings enormously on multi-decade ocean cycles tied to water temperature, and the stock was already entering a natural downturn when the fishery was taking sardines at an unsustainable rate. Pulling so many fish out during a natural decline turned a downswing into a crash. The Monterey collapse became a textbook lesson in fisheries science: a reminder that even a fish as fantastically abundant as the sardine is not inexhaustible, and that fishing pressure and ocean cycles can combine to empty a sea.

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The Sardine Today

The sardine's modern story is one of survival, partial recovery, and renewed appreciation. Pacific sardine populations have continued to rise and fall on their long natural cycles, with later booms and busts prompting repeated management measures — including outright closures of the directed Pacific sardine fishery in the United States when stocks fell low. European sardine fisheries off Iberia and in the Mediterranean remain economically important and are now managed with catch limits and stock assessments, though their health varies year to year and region to region. The hard lesson of Monterey — that abundance is not the same as inexhaustibility — is now built into how these fisheries are run.

Culturally and nutritionally, the sardine has enjoyed a striking revival. Long dismissed as humble fare, it is now prized for the very qualities that always made it valuable: it is inexpensive, sustainable relative to many larger fish, low in the heavy metals that accumulate in long-lived predators, and rich in omega-3 fatty acids, protein, calcium (from the soft edible bones), and vitamin D. The Portuguese and Spanish conserva, the grilled sardines of summer festivals, and the everyday tin in the cupboard have all been rediscovered by cooks and nutritionists alike.

The arc of the sardine is thus unusually complete. From a wild glut netted on an ancient beach, through the Roman salt-vats and garum factories, the poor coastal kitchens of a thousand years, the French invention of the tin, the world-spanning canneries, and the great Pacific collapse, the same small silver fish has been with us at every turn — and is now, once again, valued for the cheap, dense nourishment it has always quietly provided.

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Research Papers and References

The list below combines peer-reviewed studies on the biology, archaeology, and fishery history of the sardine with curated PubMed topic-search links and reputable food- and fisheries-history resources. Historical and etymological points named in the article — the Sardinia name question, the Roman garum trade, and the Colin/Nantes canning attribution — are discussed as history rather than as medical claims, and the genuinely uncertain ones are flagged in the text. Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only the stable DOI, PMID, or archive link is hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab.

  1. Aurioles-Gamboa D, et al. The Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) and the California Current: population dynamics and fishery collapse. Fisheries history and management literature. — PubMed: Pacific sardine population dynamics and collapse
  2. European sardine (Sardina pilchardus) ancient DNA, Roman fish-salting and population continuity in northwestern Iberia. Antiquity / archaeogenetics literature, 2025. — PubMed: sardine ancient DNA and Roman salting
  3. Garum and Roman fish-sauce production: archaeology and ancient DNA of Mediterranean salting installations (cetariae). — PubMed: garum and Roman fish-salting archaeology
  4. Sardine (Sardina pilchardus) stock assessment and fisheries management in the Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean. — PubMed: European sardine stock assessment
  5. Nutritional composition and health value of canned and fresh sardines (omega-3, calcium, vitamin D). — PubMed: sardine nutrition and omega-3 content
  6. Small pelagic fish, ocean regime shifts, and the boom-and-bust dynamics of sardine and anchovy populations. — PubMed: sardine-anchovy regime shifts
  7. History of food canning and appertization: Nicolas Appert and the origins of thermal food preservation. — PubMed: history of appertization and canning
  8. Heavy metal and contaminant load in small forage fish versus large predatory fish. — PubMed: contaminant load in sardines vs. large fish

External Authoritative Resources

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Connections

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