Mark Bittman’s Secrets: Why You Should Eat More Little Fishes
Find out what you’ve been missing
The first time I really remember enjoying fish, like asking for it, was in the ‘60s at one of two Third Avenue restaurants in New York: Oscar’s Salt of the Sea and Harvey’s. Both places have closed; I wish they still existed. There, I would invariably order 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 became one of the first things I cooked for myself. Increasingly, the world of seafood became much wider and more interesting than that of meat. This brings us to the ‘80s, when 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.
Eventually, I also did a little work for the National Marine Fisheries Service on what we then called underutilized species; as soon as you think a fish is “underutilized,” it usually becomes “overfished.” And I wrote a series of pieces about fish no one cooked — which, in those days, included fresh tuna — and around 1990, I sold my first cookbook, “Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking,” published in 1994.
