History Question

Given the storm I?ve stirred over on another thread over eastern Europeans eating coarse fish, it got me thinking at what point did we in the UK stop eating coarse fish as part of our diet?

Clearly it had to coincide with three things -
1. Sea fish being widely available to the general populous of the emerging towns and cities that were being expanded during the Victorian era.
2. Rapid transport, railways, this in Manchester is still evident, as what was the wholesale fish market site (now a craft centre) is still there, a stones throw from Victoria Station.
3. The commercial availability of refrigeration units and ice making equipment.

As to the latter it would seem that such equipment was commercial available in the US circa 1870s.

The rail network in the UK was by this time well-established so rapid transport links were available.

The National Federation of Anglers came into being in 1921 and I can?t remember ever reading or hearing anything about them killing their catches for food in those early days.
So it?s likely the paradigm shift to sports fishing (catch and return) came sometime between 1860s and 1921.

So what do you think?

it was after the introduction of the closed season, because it was brought in to conserve stocks from being eaten.

then again i remember my dad coming home in the 1970's with pike he'd got from a bloke at work to eat.

so for pike it must have died out in the 1980's.
i've certainly never eaten one and have no interest in doing so.

After a quick look through a couple of my books, most recipes for course fish are dated around the mid 1800's. When we stopped eating them properly would be hard to say. At a guess, taking transport into consideration I would imagine somewhere around the early 1900's. 1900-1920 Possibly.

In this day and age, appart from the EE, the only people that I know of that eat course fish in this country, not as a nececcity but more as a class thing, are the landed gentry or people who can afford not to. And they pay mighty handsomely for the privilege might I add.

Around the end of the second world war.

We simply lost our taste for them along with the herring. Very few herrings are eaten nowadays.

Surveys were done during the war to work out if we could crop our inland waters for a sustainable source of protein during the war

A club I was a member of in the 80's had a rule that any pike caught on their stretch of the Kennet had to be killed.

I accidentally caught a five pounder on luncheon meat and made some really tasty pies out of it!

Actually the chair of the same club told me that back in the 40's and early 50's fish were weighed in at the club meeting rather than on the bank! Apparently the fish were given to the poor.

I've got a recipe for cooking roach, in

Roach fishing by 'Faddist' (Edward Ensom 1939)

Some still do .........ask Ron !

It starts: "first throw away the roach..."

I can remember as a kid in the mid to late 70's seeing Bream and pike available in Sheffield fish market

As Baz says there is still a limited market - I have seen bream on occasions relatively recently - they are farmed fish not caught for the pot as was once the case - although I guess the carp originally brought into this country were effectively farmed for the table.

i remember seeing bream, carp and big roach in sheffield market in the late 80s.

As little as 8 years ago I ate some coarse fish at a party we had. Roach (I avoided), perch (very nice), crucian carp, mirror carp, eels (you forgot them, still eaten), pike, zander, bream (disgusting) and even tench. All were foreign sourced, btw.

Lee has it most accurately and Peter Stone told me that he'd eaten many a coarse fish during the war. John Essex is the man to ask on this since he's done lots of investigation into ancient match and general fishing tactics.

It is one reason that the close season was brought in, because at that time there were no such things as keepnets. They came in about the 1920's. Until then everything caught that was weighed in was killed and shared amongst friends (sometimes) after the match.

A bream or chub might taste disgusting by our standards, but it still contains the same or near nutritional value of a cod or haddock. A bit of dill or parsley to hide the taste and your kids wouldn't know the difference.

It's another reason that the LAA brought in size limits was to stop to wasteful slaughter of ALL fish. Every LAA memeber had to fish by those limits even if the match was outside the sphere of LAA rulings, the angler wasn't.

It is one reason that denied Frank Guttfield of a national title because most of the fish he caught in a match were under that size limit. The anglers that won it had caught fish well under the limit, but because they weren't LAA members they could weigh their entire catch.

Old Irish recipe for bream.

Nail to a board. Place over a pan of boiling water with bream underneath. Steam for 6 hours. Remove bream. Throw away the bream and eat the board.

Probably when rationing ended.