Ceviche

In article ,
wrote:

On Fri, 16 May 2008 10:05:47 +0100, Lazarus Cooke
wrote:

In article ,
wrote:


I Googled, and got different results. I first Googling "ceviche
'Atlantic salmon' uk" to try and get right to the, um, meat of the
matter, as it were.

Hi rd

No-one in europe would write 'atlantic salmon'. It's essentially the
only one there is. The rivers and seas and farms round the coast are
full of them. Here it's just called 'salmon'.

Pacific salmon crops up occasionally as a cheap, inferior (here),
frozen product.

Be careful with fish unless you know with whom you deal and/or you
yourself know how to identify what you are expecting. It's among the
most, um, "forged" stuff in the food service/supply industry because so
few people, including chefs, truly know the difference. Even most
consumers can tell veal from beef, real crab from "krab," or more
ridiculously, radicchio/rocket from iceberg, but fish, nope - they pay
for snapper and get tilapia, they think they're getting wild (Atlantic)
salmon and they're getting farmed Pacific, etc. I don't know that one
salmon (cheaper) is sub'ed for another (more expensive) in Europe _yet_,
(I would suspect it is) but trust me, the cheaper will be sub'ed for the
more expensive sooner rather than later anywhere it can be gotten away
with, by the supplier if not the kitchen/grocer (and oft-times, it's the
supplier, because that's where the real money is made on sub'ing).

TC,
R

I totally agree. My girlfriend comes from a fishing town on the bay of
Naples, Italy, and one of my daughters lives in Barcelona, both of
which have superb, highly competetive fish-markets. London is a very
different thing. For some reason, even though the seas here are awash
with fish, the standard of fish-monging is poor, and the knowledge of
how to deal with fish equally so.

But salmon, which used to mean luxury, is now poor people's food, and
is generally the cheapest fish available - cheaper than much meat. It
is farmed in masses off the coasts, and is always salmo. (This is
unlike oysters, where the natives are available, but very expensive,
while pacific oysters are much more easily farmed and are therefore
much cheaper and widely available. )

Thus salmon is about half the price of, say, cod and haddock, the
normal ingredients of 'fish and chips' which was once the working-class
English dish but now probably costs about seven or eight dollars per
portion to take away.

therefore, while I agree that the vendors cheat if they have an
interest in doing so, in this case they don't.

As I say, Pacific salmon is an oddity. You get it occasionally, but as
it's neither cheaper nor better than local farmed salmo salmon, why
bother?

Incidentally, the BBC radio programme 'The Food Programme' last Sunday
was about your neck of the woods. You can hear it for the next day or
so at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/foodprogramme.shtml

Lazarus