...is a difficult matter, according to this restaurant review in the Times (UK):
The naming of fish is a nightmare. They have more aliases than Maltese pimps.
Can you tell the difference between a scampi, a langoustine, a Dublin Bay
prawn or a Norwegian lobster? No, of course you can’t, because they’re all
the same thing. Except in America, where scampi can mean an Italian prawn,
even though Italian for prawn is gamba. And Americans call prawns shrimp.
More than 150 varieties of fish are regularly called red snapper, and
monkfish is also anglerfish, and occasionally a goosefish, and quite often
mistaken for a grenadier fish, which is also called rat’s tail, though it’s
difficult to tell, because none of them is ever sold with its head on. A
dead shark is a dogfish, a huss or a rock salmon. In a tin, a pilchard is a
pilchard. On the slab, it’s a Cornish sardine. Whelks are not worth eating.
So the dish formerly known as pollock is now colin. Except that colin is already another fish; it’s the French name for hake. Which in Ireland is often called fake, because it’s sold in chippies as cod. The Chilean sea bass is a Patagonian toothfish, and fish fingers aren’t. This business of renaming things to make them taste better or cost more makes me irrationally angry, which is another word for furious. Why should I care? The fish don’t care. They probably go through their whole lives thinking they’re called Derek the whale, before discovering at the last moment that, in fact, they’re colin the pollock.
So the dish formerly known as pollock is now colin. Except that colin is already another fish; it’s the French name for hake. Which in Ireland is often called fake, because it’s sold in chippies as cod. The Chilean sea bass is a Patagonian toothfish, and fish fingers aren’t. This business of renaming things to make them taste better or cost more makes me irrationally angry, which is another word for furious. Why should I care? The fish don’t care. They probably go through their whole lives thinking they’re called Derek the whale, before discovering at the last moment that, in fact, they’re colin the pollock.
Hat tip to Fritinancy reader Mr. Wuxtry, who forwarded the link. The Times's restaurant reviewer, by the way, is named A.A. Gill. "And who better to write about fish than a man named Gill?" asks Mr. Wuxtry. Who indeed.
And then there's "scrod," which, here in New England, means pretty much "whatever's fresh." (Oh, and there's a fun old joke at the Wikipedia entry for "scrod": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrod.)
Posted by: Karen | April 21, 2009 at 04:36 PM