In Tuna-Obsessed Tunisia, a Favorite Food Becomes a Lot Less Affordable (2024)

Perhaps you are one of the more than 5,000 subscribers to “Popping Tins,” an email newsletter devoted exclusively to tinned seafood. Perhaps you belong to a tinned-fish-of-the-month club, or have leafed through a tinned-fish-focused cookbook that tells you how best to cook a food already cooked.

Perhaps you, like some TikTok users, even hold a weekly “tinned-fish date night” with your spouse.

But until you have been to Tunisia, whose North African coast faces Italy across the Mediterranean Sea, you have not realized the full culinary possibilities of tinned fish — in this case, tuna.

The Tunisians put canned tuna on salads. They put it on bowls of stew. They dollop it atop pasta. They stuff it in brik, the hot pastries of shatter-crisp dough. They toss it on the grilled pepper-and-tomato appetizer salata mechouia, arranging it in a decorative pattern along with a quartered hard-boiled egg and an olive or two.

Pizza arrives with a handful of canned tuna in the middle. Sandwich-shop customers who ask for no tuna often get a blank stare, a frown of confusion, the admonition, “just a little” — and a sandwich scattered with tuna.

“We add tuna, and it’s Tunisian,” said Alaeddine Boumaiza, 29, a chef who runs pop-up dinners in Tunis, the capital. “If you want to eat Tunisian food, ask if there’s tuna on it or not.”

He exaggerates only minimally.