Interesting News

I haven't been in a cooking mood for a while, I'm actually contemplating a big cooking project in the near future and need to do quite a bit of research for it, so I've had my nose in a book - instead of my usual feed bag - for the past week. more on that later, but here's something interesting I came along recently. A headline in the New Scientist reads "Cookbook threat to fish" and cites a study into the evolving topography of fish dishes in cookbooks from 1885 to 2007 and measures shifts in trend according to the trophic level of the fish used - a measure of how high the fish is up in the food chain. The basic outline is:
Level 1: Plants and algae that make their own food, primary producers
Level 2: Herbivores that eat plants, primary consumers
Level 3: Carnivores that eat herbivores, secondary consumers
Level 4: Carnivores that eat other carnivores, tertiary consumers
Level 5: Apex predators, who are at the top of the food chain

Each fish presumably has it's own level within the system, starting off at 2.00 for clams, mussels and all that junk and going all the way to around 4.58 for marlin. Overall they found that the average trophic level rose from 2.92 things like (sardines) to 3.40 (mackerel and flounder), it doesn't seem like a king's feast or anything but that's just the average, they found increasing numbers of recipes for things like tuna and cod (around 4.20), what they call aspirational fish. If you had a choice between munching sardines out of the can for dinner or a cod and chips you would obviously choose the latter, but the 0.15 change in trophic levels has a huge impact on the ecosystem. It's funny, I would have thought Richie Rich would be shoveling down oysters and lobster, but I suppose firm fleshed fish is more accessible. I did my own totally unscientific research in to this (under the title "I Have Too Much Time On My Hands") and here's what I found.
First stop is my tatty copy of Good Housekeeping's Menus from 1954, this is about as aspirational as it's gets for the time, coupling in one volume recipes for guest-impressing dishes like Souffle Surprise! with practical tips on how to use the latest kitchen gadgets, such as a fridge. Most fish recipes here call for nondescript 'cooked white fish' to shape into balls or stuff something with, salmon is called for as an alternative to trout - not the other way round, and there are numerous recipes for roes and sardines. The onus in this book is very much on meat, and most of the fish dishes are cooked in such a way as to conceal much of the flavour. Very sensible, hearty dishes.
Next is Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking from 1961. French food, as we all know, is the most sophisticated fare, something us plebs can only drool about in our sleep, presented here for the rube housewives who want to recreate the magic at home. Child followed this with a TV series which made the experience less daunting. And what are we cooking? There's an entire chapter on fish, but it's shorter than the individual chapters for meat, poultry, eggs, vegetables, and even sauces. The most prevalent contenders are lobsters, scallops and the famous 'white fish' with preference being given to sole. Fresh and canned salmon and tuna also seem to interchangeable and almost an afterthought. Oh la la! OK, back into the time machine.
Hey, it's 1989, my excuse for skipping almost 20 years is that I'm looking into one of Keith Floyd's later books, an anthology of his collected wisdom. Whilst it features a lot of firm British favorites like herring and 'cooked white fish', it begins to veer towards things like sashimi and other exotics picked up from around the world. There's an obvious correlation between colonialism and food imports, but once places in Europe and the Far East become typical holiday spots as well, demand for non local delicacies soars. And it's all Keith Floyd's fault!
Lastly I'm going to look through my most recent acquisition, The Vicar's Wife's Cookbook, 2009. To me this seems like the most typical modern lifestyle book. Written by a smart Londoner who somehow ended up as a housewife with nothing to do but learn how to cook for her family, this is cautious and safe but in a diametrically opposite way to it's 1954. 'White fish' is replaced by expensive, meaty, flash fried halibut, tuna and haddock. Instead of challenging flavours like sardine, eel and mackerel, disguised with other ingredients and overcooking, the shift is towards blander, larger fish that can more closely resemble 'safer' protein sources like chicken or whatever. There are far more meat recipes than fish in this book.

The conclusion from this selection would seem to be that tastes have changed, duh. Enough proselytizing.