Simon Courtauld

I wonder whether the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, will eat quail again after the shooting incident in south Texas last month, when he ignored the most basic safety rules in shooting at his intended target while unable to see that an elderly gentleman was in his line of fire. The birds that Mr Cheney was trying to shoot would have been either scaled or bobwhite quail, both species which take to the air only reluctantly, when put up by ‘bird dogs’. They never fly very far or very high, making Mr Cheney’s negligence — he was apparently firing into a low, late-afternoon sun — the more culpable. No quail are shot in this country, where a summer visitor, coturnix coturnix (common quail), is the only one to be seen in the wild, and only in southern England.

It is one of life’s little mysteries that, outside the circle of those involved in game shooting, so few pheasants are bought and eaten, in a country where between 15 and 20 million birds are reared each year. I have sometimes wondered whether the association of pheasants with wartime food — during the winter of 1940 the shooting season was extended into February to provide an additional stock of meat — may provide part of the answer. This may once have been so, but surely not now.

Where are the pike, the char, the carp of yesteryear? Still in English lakes and rivers, but they are not to be found in the English kitchen. Pike, then called luce, are mentioned in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and they were on the menu at King Henry IV’s coronation banquet at the end of the 14th century; but today the cooking of them is left to the French. Char live in the Lake District: salted char was sent down to Hampton Court for King Henry VIII’s pleasure, and potted char was popular in the 18th century. It was good to see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall cooking them on television the other day, on the shore of Coniston Water, but I wonder how many others have eaten the fish.

Many of us, not being regular purchasers of the sturgeon’s eggs, will be unaware of the gravity of the caviar crisis. I have only just learnt that the population of the beluga sturgeon, which produces the best-quality caviar and lives mostly in the Caspian Sea, has suffered a 90 per cent decline in the past 20 years. It would seem that the fishing in this sea was much better regulated in the days of communism in the Soviet Union and the Shah’s regime in Iran.

You don’t often see a large turbot these days. My guess is that the big ones, like most of the lobsters and crabs caught in our waters, go to Spain or France. The specimen which I saw in Paris earlier this year was being cut into fat steaks for sale at 90 euros per kilo, or about £27.50 per pound. Perhaps there is no market in Britain for the king of white fish at this sort of price. I have in the larder a long, oval fish kettle suitable for salmon, but I wonder whether anyone still uses the diamond-shaped kettle which was designed, probably in the 19th century, to take large flat fish and especially turbot. In France it is called a turbotière and is no doubt still in service in grand kitchens.

The first barracuda to be caught in British waters was landed at Newlyn, Cornwall four years ago. This summer giant fin whales have been spotted off the Pembrokeshire coast. The evidence of these alien visitors may be attributable to global warming, or to changes in the flow of ocean currents, but it makes one wonder if it may be only a matter of time before a fearsome great white shark moves up the Atlantic from its present killing grounds on the South African coast to the bathing beaches of north Cornwall (from where, watching a school of porpoises not being chased by a shark, I am writing this month). I have fished for blue shark off this coast, and I remember once seeing a huge basking shark close to the boat from which we were fishing for mackerel.

I have recently acquired a charming little book by Ambrose Heath called From Creel to Kitchen. Published in 1939, it offers recipes for 20 species of freshwater fish caught in our rivers and lakes, including barbel, chub, gudgeon, roach and tench, though not powan or the unappealingly named burbot. It had not occurred to me that there are apparently more species of fish in fresh water than in the sea, though I doubt whether many readers, or indeed the editor, would be impressed by my devoting a column to dace or rudd. But I do think perch deserves more than a mention in passing.

Whiting does not seem to be fashionable these days — perhaps it never was — but in my early 20th-century edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica it is described as ‘one of the most valuable food fishes of northern Europe’. This may be due in part to its not necessarily enviable reputation as being good for invalids. It is said to be wholesome and digestible, especially when steamed, but unfortunately the ‘invalid’ tag puts one in mind of hospitals and old people’s homes where the smell from the kitchen of watery, overcooked cabbage mingles with the smell of watery, overcooked and not entirely fresh fish. Whiting deserves better than that.

Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon, is a most remarkable fish. Having gone to sea, where it has to run the gauntlet of modern deep-sea trawlers, it returns, a year or up to three years later, to the river of its birth to spawn. On the way it may fall prey to seals, to estuarial nets and to disease emanating from salmon farms. Once in the river it may have to leap up and over waterfalls (‘salar’ means the leaper) as it swims upstream, eating nothing until, having spawned, it dies in the river or returns to the sea. In this final phase of its life it is known as a kelt. There has been a worrying dearth of wild Scottish salmon, though some improvement was seen last year in the east coast rivers, following a reduction in drift-netting offshore.

A few years before his assassination in 1908, King Carlos of Portugal published a book on the tuna, its distribution and the various species of the fish. I am not aware of any other reigning monarch having written a book on fish, and it may have been Carlos’s most important legacy. In those days, the English name for tuna was tunny, and it is not entirely clear why or when it was changed to tuna. The word may be an import from the United States, since that is the Spanish–American word for the Pacific species of the fish caught off the California coast. From European waters we are familiar with the yellow-fin and blue-fin tuna, while the albacore and skipjack are inferior species often used for canning.

An Indian friend with whom I have been staying in the Nilgiri Hills was asking what had happened to the whitebait which he used to enjoy years ago in England, during his time at Cambridge. In those far-off days whitebait appeared on restaurant or pub menus as a starter with the same frequency as egg mayonnaise or half an avocado pear. Tiny fish known as whiting in Tamil Nadu made very good whitebait, he said, and I had seen something similar in Kerala (there called mullet) pulled from the sea in those ‘Chinese’ fishing nets introduced from the Far East in the 14th century.

Why, I wonder, is a fish revered in one European country yet largely ignored in the others? As a fish of the Atlantic, and other cold waters, hake is little known in exclusively Mediterranean countries. Nor is it hugely popular in France, where it is called by one of three names — merlu, merluche, colin — suggesting that the French are unsure about it. Hake is certainly available here but a lot of the British catch is sold to the country which really can’t get enough of it. This, of course, is Spain, where hake (merluza) is the national fish. And when one considers that the Spaniards eat about four times more fish per head than we do, the question arises whether there is enough hake in European waters to satisfy this enormous demand.

If America can be associated with one shellfish more than any other, it must surely be the clam. I know that New England is supposedly the home of the clambake, but you can’t go far in any state without meeting clams in some form — raw in the shell, clam chowder, clam juice or that irresistible Clamato juice, of which there is far too little sold in this country. In Utah earlier this month (for the skiing, not the Mormons), I had a delicious dish of steamed clams in a thin saffron sauce with coriander leaves, and on another occasion, after a glorious day in the mountains, a thick clam chowder with potato and bacon was served after three different sorts of oyster and before three varieties of crab — Alaskan King, Snow and Dungeness.

There is plenty of life, as well as recent death, in a fish market. For its colour and noise and atmosphere the market by the Rialto bridge in Venice is as fascinating to me as a visit to the Scuola degli Schiavoni to see the Carpaccios. To buy, or just to admire, the fish landed on the Spanish Mediterranean coast I would highly recommend the Boqueria in Barcelona; and there is no better place than the wholesale market in Vigo to see the variety of Atlantic fish which are unloaded on to the quay throughout the night. Though I have never been to the famous market at Boulogne, a friend urged me to go to Lorient on the Brittany coast when I was staying nearby a few years ago.

We are in danger of losing our eels. To many people this may be of little interest, but it is a serious matter. The vast numbers of baby eels (elvers) which cross the Atlantic from the Sargasso Sea, somewhere near Bermuda, and end up in European rivers two or three years later have been falling dramatically. Many are being netted offshore, but the principal explanation blames the warming of the Arctic Ocean, resulting in weaker currents to carry the elvers to their destination. When they struggle into the river estuaries and begin the last stage of their journey upstream, they may meet modern sluices without eel passes, or they may meet polluted water and die of disease. The eel catchers of the East Anglian fens (eels from Ely, geddit?

A bass, I have always thought, is a bass, but these days it is called sea bass — quite redundantly, since freshwater bass are not known in Europe. The bream of the sea, on the other hand, should be distinguished from the freshwater fish of the same name which is related to carp. Instead, it is usually referred to only by its colour — black, red or gilthead; but if it is described simply as ‘sea bream’, which I have seen recently on an expensive London restaurant menu, make sure you know which one you are getting.