The curiosities of food

by P. L. Simmonds

As food, the skate is held in very different degrees of estimation in different places. In London, large quantities are consumed, and crimped skate is considered delicate and well flavoured; but on some parts of the English coast, although caught in considerable numbers, the flesh is seldom eaten, and is only used for baiting lobster pots. The French are great consumers of the skate; and its flesh is used extensively both at New York and Boston. By many it is deemed a great delicacy. After the fish is skinned, the fleshy part of the huge pectoral fins, which is beautifully white, is cut into long thin slips, about an inch wide; these are rolled like ribbon, and dressed in that form.

The capelan (Mallotus villosus), the smallest species of the salmon family, possesses like the smelt the cucumber smell, but it differs from the smelt in never entering fresh-water streams. As an article of bait for cod, and other fish of that class, the capelan is a fish of much importance; whenever abundant, the cod-fishing is excellent. It has been found as far north in the arctic region as man has yet penetrated; and it forms so important an article of food in Greenland, that it has been termed the daily bread of the natives. In Newfoundland, it is dried in large quantities, and exported to London, where it is sold principally in the oyster shops.

The large, flat-fish known as the halibut (Hippoglossus vulgaris), which sometimes attains the weight of 300 lbs, is often taken by the cod-fishers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. These fish are cut in slices, and pickled in barrels, in which state they sell at half the price of the best herrings. The flesh, though white and firm, is dry, and the muscular fibres coarse. The fins and flaps are however esteemed delicacies.

The mackerel of the British North American coasts is of a much finer flavour than those caught on the shores of Europe.

The salmon are also noted for their very fine flavour.

If there are no turbot, brill, or sole, in the St. Lawrence, there are other delicacies. A species of eel is exceedingly abundant and frequently of large size. One of these, a sea-eel, split, salted, and smoked, without the head, was 30 inches in length, and 15 inches in diameter, breadth as split, nearly the size of an ordinary smoked salmon and quite as thick. 300 barrels of large eels, taken with the spear in the Buctouche river, are usually salted-down for winter use. They are generally excessively fat, the flesh very white and exceedingly well flavoured. Packages of eels have been lately imported into London from Prince Edward’s Island. Smoked eels are very delicious, and they have even begun to preserve these fish thus at Port Phillip.

The fisheries of the North American lakes and rivers are not prosecuted as they might be, but are beginning to receive more attention. The white-fish (Corregonus albus) is found in all the deep lakes west of the Mississippi, and indeed from Lake Erie to the Polar Sea. That which is taken in Leech Lake is said by amateurs to be more highly flavoured than even that of Lake Superior. There is another species of this fish, called by the Indians tuliby or ottuniby (Corregonus artidi), which resembles it, but is much less esteemed. Both species furnish a wholesome and palatable food.

The French Canadians call this fish Poisson Pointu, and the English term them ‘gizzard fish.’ The origin of the latter name appears to be, that the fish feeds largely on fresh-water shell fish and shelly molluscs; and its stomach thereby gains an extraordinary thickness, and resembles the gizzard of a fowl. The stomach, when cleaned and boiled, is a favourite morsel with the Canadian voyageurs.

The white-fish of the bays and lakes of Canada is represented to be the finest fish in the world by the Canadians. The flavour of it is incomparable, especially when split open and fried with eggs and crumbs of bread. They weigh on the average about 2 lbs. each when cleaned—100 of them filling a good sized barrel. Those caught in Lake Huron are more highly prized than any others.

Several Indian tribes mainly subsist upon this fish, and it forms the principal food at many of the fur posts for eight or nine months of the year, the supply of other articles of diet being scanty and casual. Its usual weight in the northern regions is from 2 to 3 lbs., but it has been taken in the clear, deep, and cold waters of Lake Huron, of the weight of 13 lbs. The largest seen in the vicinity of Hudson’s Bay weighed between 4 and 5 lbs., and measured 20 inches in length, and 4 in depth. One of 7 lbs. weight, caught in Lake Huron, was 27 inches long.