Lobster used to be poor people's food
In colonial New England, LOBSTER was so plentiful that storms washed them up on beaches in heaps. It was fed to prisoners and servants, used as bait and dug into fields as fertiliser. In the 1800s, railway companies served tinned lobster to passengers from inland who had never heard of its reputation, and it slowly turned into a luxury.
A live lobster is a dull greenish-brown. Its shell holds a red pigment wrapped up in a protein that hides the colour, and cooking breaks the protein apart, so the red shows through. The same pigment turns a SHRIMP, a PRAWN, a CRAB and a CRAYFISH pink or red in the pot, and it is what makes SALMON flesh pink, from the tiny shellfish the fish eat.
The fish that fed Europe
Salted and dried, COD keeps for years, which made it one of the most important foods in Europe for centuries. Fishermen from the Basque country, England and Portugal sailed across the Atlantic to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where the fish were so thick that members of John Cabot's crew in 1497 reported that they could be scooped up in baskets. By the 1990s, centuries of fishing had caught almost all of them. In 1992 Canada banned cod fishing there, and around 30,000 people lost their jobs overnight. The cod still have not fully come back.
Fish and chips shops still argue about cod and HADDOCK: in much of northern England haddock is the favourite, and in the south it is cod, with a golden FILLET in crisp batter either way.
Sushi began as a way to keep fish
The first SUSHI was not a snack. In south-east Asia and later in Japan, fish was packed in cooked rice and left for months, while the rice fermented and preserved it; then the rice was thrown away. In the 1820s, in Edo, the city now called Tokyo, street stalls began selling fresh fish pressed onto a small mound of vinegared rice, to be eaten straight away, and that fast food became nigiri sushi.
Salmon sushi is surprisingly new. Japanese diners long avoided raw salmon because wild Pacific salmon can carry parasites. In the 1980s Norway, which farmed salmon in cold, clean water, began a long campaign to sell it to Japan for sushi, and by the 1990s it had caught on. At the first TUNA auction of 2019 in Tokyo, one bluefin tuna sold for more than three million dollars.
Small fish, big eyes and a lot of filtering
The SARDINE may be named after the island of Sardinia, where it was once plentiful, and the saying packed like sardines comes from the tins they are squeezed into. In the Netherlands, new-season HERRING is eaten raw, held up by the tail and lowered into the mouth. CAVIAR is the salted eggs of the sturgeon, a fish so overfished in the Caspian Sea that most caviar now comes from farms.
A SCALLOP swims by clapping its shells together to squirt out jets of water, and it has up to two hundred tiny eyes along the edge of its shell. An OYSTER filters around 190 litres of water a day, cleaning it as it feeds, and MUSSELS glue themselves to rocks with tough threads. Our seashells page covers the shells themselves. CALAMARI is simply the Italian for squid, and an OCTOPUS is its eight-armed cousin, covered on our sea animals page.