issue 1: New Beginnings
Hot girls, Tinned Fish, and my Father
Paula Turcotte
My father has never been a chef. My brothers and I unanimously recall that nothing could evacuate our childhood kitchen faster than my father ambling toward the pantry. This could only mean he was heading for his trusty stockpile of tinned seafood on the third shelf down. Smoked oysters were his favourite. My brothers and I couldn’t abide the way Dad would eschew condiment or garnish, choosing instead to fork the giant, fishy boogers straight out of the tin. There was canned sockeye salmon, too, its pink flesh full of tiny bones and bits of skin, which he’d mash with gobs of mayonnaise.
“Who’s hungry?” he’d crow, filling a spoonful to offer us if we stood watching from nearby. He repeated this gesture no matter how many times we dramatically rejected his attempts to share— often shrieking and dodging his utensils to avoid the unsavoury mixture.
But worst of all were the sardines: their tiny, decapitated bodies, silvery carcasses covered in disintegrating scales. He’d anoint slices of flax bread with the contents of a tin, fishy oil and all, and devour these open-faced sandwiches on the ancient striped couch while watching the PGA tour on Sundays after church. When he brought his plate to the kitchen, some of us might trickle back in, satisfied that the fish-mongering had concluded. My youngest brother, who had a particularly delicate stomach, refused to re-enter the vicinity until the lingering odours had diffused.
Dad’s insistence on fishy snacks despite our protests felt in a lot of ways concatenate to the rest of his presence in our lives. At his behest, we all attended a private Catholic school (read: a borderline cult) and Mass twice a week (Friday afternoons at school, Sunday mornings as a family). I was in staunch opposition to this situation and frequently wound up in the offices of various adults at the school, in trouble for talking back on what I discovered to be non-negotiable points.
Our religion teacher, an alarmingly elderly woman who was not a nun but felt nun-adjacent, loved to wax on at length about the evil of abortion. At fourteen, I finally found the gumption to raise my hand, ready to have my say when she ran out of steam. When she called on me, I launched into a rant about the hypocrisy of punishing women for a man’s “errant emissions” and their consequences (I’d recently watched Legally Blonde and felt like I was Elle Woods grilling the pool boy). After I was finished, the classroom was pregnant with a collectively held breath; we could almost hear the veins in her paper-skinned temples throb. She silently pointed me to the door.
On Sunday mornings, my father and I played a game of chicken. I remained in my pyjamas while he made loud announcements about how many minutes were left until we had to leave for church. Inevitably, the following would occur:
Dad: Time to get dressed. We’re going to be late.
Me: I’m not going.
Dad: You’re going even if I have to drag you there.
Me: Drag me then.
Dad: Go get dressed and we’re going to have a conversation about this later.
Me: Make me.
Dad: As long as you live under this roof you’re going to church, young lady.
Mom: Everyone please stop yelling!
Once, while we were on vacation, this screaming match began while my father was already in the driver’s seat of the rental car. It ended with him driving the car into the wall of the rental house garage. Over time, I carefully honed my ability to appear as though I was participating in Mass while daydreaming about the million-and-one places I would rather be (the library, an Avril Lavigne concert, inside the lion enclosure at the zoo).
For a long time, whether in conscious opposition to my father’s culinary preferences or not, I tolerated only canned tuna, and only in the form of my mother’s tuna melts. It turns out that enough melted cheese makes most things palatable. When I was in university, Mom passed down a recipe for tuna-and-egg-noodle casserole that she insisted had carried her through her undergraduate degree. The recipe featured—what else—melted cheese, alongside the hallmark of 1980s cuisine: a can of Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup. When I pulled the casserole out of the oven, my housemates descended like vultures upon roadkill, and we ate it straight out of the pan with our forks. The casserole became a staple in our household, the recipe taped up on our yellowing fridge. It had the distinct benefit of requiring very few perishable ingredients. Cans of tuna (and soup) were always in the pantry. I soon developed the habit of stirring the tuna into pots of Kraft Dinner, a practice my roommates found abhorrent but one I was convinced made a well-rounded meal, with three out of four food groups represented.
Other than these notable exceptions, I largely abstained from tinned fish consumption until my late twenties, when Brooklyn chef Alison Roman first crossed my Instagram feed. It was love at first scroll. I was enamoured with her smart, quippy captions under pictures of bucatini flaked with red pepper and bowls of citrusy olives. It took me a while to realize it wasn’t just her recipes that were doing it for me. I had a full-blown crush on her. I ate up hours watching Alison’s cooking videos. I loved the way she’d wipe her hands on her Levi’s between steps. I loved her red lipstick and her repartee. I was a pescatarian and I still watched the entire eleven minutes and eight seconds of Alison making lamb ragù.
But while working my way through her cookbooks, an alarming trend emerged: anchovies. They were everywhere. Clenched between her signature orange-red nails. Sizzling in an ungodly amount of olive oil. Glistening atop a leek tart. I read dubiously through a recipe for “shallot pasta” that called for twelve—12!—anchovy fillets. Commenters who identified as former anchovy haters proclaimed that they had seen the light. By that point, if Alison had written a recipe that included the step “immerse yourself in a piranha-infested pond,” I would have done it. I bought the anchovies.
I sautéed the shallots as instructed, then bravely peeled the tin lid off and plunked the fillets into my pot. To my surprise, they didn’t smell terrible, and they began to dissolve just as Alison had said they would. A tube of tomato paste further disguised any fishiness. I thinned the thick mixture with some pasta water, poured in my rigatoni, and sprinkled on some salty, garlicky parsley. It certainly looked passable, if not as polished as Alison’s version.
Tasting the dish felt like a first kiss: this is what I’d been missing? It turned out anchovies weren’t just tolerable; they were heavenly. I ate most of the pasta (“serves four”) straight out of the pot while standing over the stove. At that point in my life, this wasn’t unusual. I was regularly devouring portions that could have served a small family, seeking comfort in food when it eluded me elsewhere.
I bought ten more tins of anchovies and set out to convert my friends and family. It wasn’t long before I was eating the fillets whole on top of buttered, toasted sourdough. Then, the small grocer near my house began carrying a variety of conservas. When he saw me eyeing the tins, the grocer encouraged me to serve them “at a picnic.” I was deeply pleased that the grocer saw me as the sort of person who might serve conservas at a picnic (though more likely I was just a sucker for his sales tactics). I left the store with my arms full of escabeche mussels and smoked octopus, ready to embrace my new identity as a picnicker.
The tins hadn’t left my cupboard before I first encountered the Internet tinned fish discourse. I wasn’t Online Enough to see it play out firsthand on Twitter, but I came across a screenshot on a friend’s Instagram story:
I was, apparently, not alone in my newfound love for canned seafood. Soon, I started getting targeted ads for tins splashed with technicolour fish illustrations. Lifestyle influencers plugged recipes for mackerel salads next to their Drybar endorsements. Caroline Goldfarb, screenwriter and founder of the suddenly ubiquitous company Fishwife, called tinned fish “the ultimate hot girl food.” My father has never been on trend in his life, much less ahead of one, so I was astonished that his beloved snack was suddenly front and centre in the cultural zeitgeist. When I was in middle school, a tuna sandwich for lunch was equivalent to loudly announcing you had lice. Now, Instagram “recipe developers” were being paid to peddle trendy ocean-wise brands in their peppy thirty-second videos.
The hot-girls-eat-tinned-fish craze was occurring on the same timeline as my realization that I really wanted to kiss said hot girls. Catholicism, while very keen on seafood (Jesus didn’t feed the five thousand with roast beef), was much less gung-ho on same-sex attraction. My all-girls education from grades six to nine was geared toward ensuring we were Good Submissive Daughters who would one day be Good Submissive Wives to our breadwinner husbands. When same-sex marriage was legalized in Canada in 2005, we prayed daily in homeroom for the souls of those who had chosen a path of sin. Meanwhile, my best friend and I made a written pact that we would one day live together in a house with our children, and our husbands could “live together in another house in the same cul-de-sac.” The homoeroticism of girls-school friendships is, ironically, unparalleled.
Although I’d long rejected the tenets of Catholicism and had supported 2SLGBTQIA+ causes since I was in high school, I didn’t question my own sexuality until the breakdown of a five-year hetero relationship in my late twenties. I’d had crushes on women for as long as I could remember, but I’d always described them with the term “girl-crush.” The necessary invalidation of any possible queer feelings (“of course I don’t like her like her”) now smacks of the same internalized homophobia that popularized “no homo” in the same era. But these crushes felt no different than my crushes on boys, and I spent grade eleven blushing near-purple whenever I’d pass the women’s soccer captain in the hall on my way to math.
Ten years later, confused, horny, and full of anchovies, I was writing with the fervour of a twelve-year-old in her journal, trying to string myself together the only way I knew how. Every time I’d sidle up to the word bisexual I felt like three monkeys in a trench coat: a glaring impostor. I’d only ever been with men, and I felt sure I’d never be “queer enough” to consider claiming the label for myself. It’s well-documented that bi representation in media and culture has always been low. I didn’t see myself in the few bi characters on TV (Detective Rosa Diaz is way cooler and more mysterious than I’ll ever be, ditto Kalinda Sharma, I’m not nearly as messy as Piper Chapman) and, at the time, I only knew one or maybe two people in real life who were bi and out.
So I enrolled in a queer writing class. I’d taken many workshops before, but this one was different. It was the first place I gave myself license to write about queerness with the understanding that others would read it. Not long after that, one of my best friends, who was in a straight-passing relationship, came out to me. The thought that she wasn’t “queer enough” because she was married to a man never crossed my mind. This, in turn, gave me the courage to come out to her; I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so connected to a friend, before or since. We were lucky—being able to discuss our insecurities around our sexuality was incredibly validating for both of us.
From the outside, I’m sure it didn’t look like my life changed much. By the time I’d embraced my bisexuality, I was in a relationship with a cisgender man, which is probably the most direct route to bi erasure. But for me it was, and is, about more than just who I want to see naked. Because, as Jen Winston says in their book Greedy, “Bisexuality isn’t just an identity—it’s a lens through which to reimagine our world.” If I could unravel my attraction to other genders from its hiding place under twenty-seven years of Catholic guilt, and devour the tinned fish I’d once so despised, in what other ways could my world look radically different?
The worst part about the word “bisexual” is that it has the word “sex” in it: the idea of saying it aloud to my parents and brothers feels much more intimate than saying “I’m lesbian” or “I’m gay.” I didn’t, and still haven’t, “come out” in any official sense of the term—no rainbowed Instagram post, no family sit-down. I’m also not convinced I’d be warmly received. My father, for his part, is still the same man he’s always been: religious conviction, fish, and all. He eats the same grocery-store brands he has since my childhood; I’m sure he’d balk at a fifteen-dollar tin of oysters covered in trendy calligraphy. He still eats open-faced salmon sandwiches three times a week, and he still can’t figure out which recycling bin his cans belong in. We butt heads less often these days now that I’m a semi-functioning adult. But he’s still Catholic, and I’m still a heathen. We exist on different planes, and that’s something I’ve accepted—square pegs, round holes and all that.
But while I was writing this, I wandered to the kitchen in search of a snack, as I do. I opened the fridge, which was bare, and then the pantry. My last tin of sardines peeked out at me, hiding toward the back on the third shelf down.
Paula Turcotte loves her dog, your dog, and Raisin Bran. She was born and raised on Treaty 7 land, home of the Siksika, Piikani, Kainai, Tsuut'ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations. Her work has been published in Canthius, Arc Poetry, untethered, and elsewhere. Paula is a poetry editor at MAYDAY.