When in Doubt, Eat Sardines

I’m nearly certain that the first time I ate fish it was either canned tuna or my grandmother’s gefilte (which, imagine my surprise 20 years later, turned out to be almost the same as a fancy French thing called quenelles). I have no problem with either, but the first time I remember intentionally eating fish, asking for it, was in the 60s at one of two Third Avenue restaurants. Those were called Oscar’s (“Salt of the Sea”) and Harvey’s, and I wish they still existed. There I would order, invariably, fried scallops; why, I do not know—that’s what I liked.

Years went by. I discovered lobster tail (always sold frozen, at least in those days, and certainly imported), then lobster (one of the first things I cooked for myself), and, much later, that world of seafood which, to me, was much wider and more interesting than that of meat.

Fish-wise, things became increasingly complicated over the years, but for a while I lived in ignorant bliss. In the 80s, I haunted the old Italian and African-American seafood stores in New Haven and, thanks to those folks, learned the basics of fish in a natural way. I did a little work for National Marine Fisheries Service on what we then called underutilized species (note: as soon as you think a fish is “underutilized” it usually becomes “overfished”). I wrote a series of pieces about fish no one cooked (which, in those days, included fresh tuna) for the Washington Post. And, around 1990, I sold my first cookbook, which was called Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking, and was published in 1994.

Today’s underutilized is likely to be tomorrow’s overfished, and even current information tends to be conflicting and confusing; that’s yet another topic.