Tuna

At the beginning of the twentieth century, few Americans ate tuna. Within a few decades, tuna rose from obscurity to become America’s most consumed fish. At the century’s end, high-priced tuna was ranked among America’s finest culinary delicacies. Tuna is an oceanic fish in the Scombridae family related to mackerel and bonito. Historically, tuna has been consumed for hundreds of years in the Mediterranean, Latin America, Asia, and Polynesia. Although tuna, particularly albacore, skipjack, yellowfin, and bluefin, was abundant off North American shores, it was rarely consumed. In The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States (1884), G. Brown Goode proclaimed that tuna was hardly ever eaten in America, although it was occasionally fed to animals or used as a bait fish. This lack of interest in tuna was most likely due to America’s culinary history: British cookery dominated American cookery until the twentieth century, and tuna was not an important fish in British cookery. Beginning in the 1870s, sports fishermen were enthralled with catching tuna. Goode cited one report that fishing for it was “quite exciting, although tiresome and requiring a good deal of skill, as in the efforts of these fish to escape they pull with such violence as to endanger the lives of the fishermen by dragging them overboard.” By 1898 tuna fishing was so popular that the Avalon Tuna Club was organized on Santa Catalina Island off mainland California.