By MARK BITTMAN
Published: June 9, 2009
IN 1994, I published my first book, “Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking.” The premise was straightforward: if you buy fish fresh and cook it simply, you’ll eat well.
It quickly became much more complicated, because “Fish” appeared in the midst of a revolution, one that has transformed the world of seafood.
Since the ’80s, we’ve seen the surge of international trade (hello, orange roughy), the accelerating aquaculture of fin fish (hello, “Norwegian” salmon) and — the most radical change of all — the rise of large-fleet fishing that began in the 1950s and has since depleted the stocks of fish in all the world’s oceans.
Merely buying a piece of fish has become so challenging that when my publisher asked if I wanted to revise the book, I felt I had to decline. The cooking remains unchanged, but the buying has become a logistical and ethical nightmare. (Prices are no longer exactly friendly, either.)
I learned about buying sea creatures in the late ’70s at the sides of two old-time New Haven fishmongers who ran competing markets with differing styles. One brought in every fish he could find, mostly by going (or sending his help) to the Fulton Fish Market, Boston and Point Judith, R.I.
The other relied more on the trucks that worked the East Coast, going from fleet to fleet and market to market: A driver would start in Portland, Me., for example, with lobsters and scallops, and drive to Boston, where he might drop off lobsters and pick up cod and quahogs, then move on to Providence or Point Judith, where he would drop off whatever was in demand and load squid and swordfish. In New Haven he might find flounder. From there, he would hit New York, Cape May, Maryland, right down to Virginia or even Georgia or Florida. Then, his northern load diminished, his southern load — pompano, porgies, spots, snapper — in full supply, he would reverse the trip.
This makes me nostalgic. I may have missed out on the nickel-a-flounder days in New Haven, but I got to shop, learn about and cook fish at a time when my selections were varied and mostly local. Occasionally, there would be Pacific salmon or mahi-mahi, but because these were the days before the creation of cheap air fare for fish (Norwegian farm-raised salmon initiated that business), orange roughy, Pacific cod and Chilean sea bass (actually Patagonian toothfish) were unheard of.
From these experiences, I learned that not only should fish be fresh or at least high quality (some frozen fish is the latter but not the former), but that its source is also important. Tilefish came from New Jersey; sea trout came from the Carolinas; scallops were from Maine or, even better, Long Island or the Cape; and so on.
Fish became the center of my professional world. For a time I worked for Sea Grant, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and my role was promoting “underutilized” species. (File this under “We all make mistakes.” Until recently, the ocean was thought to be self-healing.)
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MARK BITTMAN Interviewed
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