Avocado-Sardíne Toasts

Avocados have been available to cooks in the Mediterranean since the sixteenth century, when Cortès brought them back from the New World. It was in Catalonia where I first tasted this simple dish, a combination of silky, paper-thin slices of ripe avocado and marinated fat strips of salty sardine fillets topped with crisp strings of scallions and chives, which makes for a great textural contrast—easy to duplicate and hard to forget.

The combination is based on a dish from the Canary