Fish

The British are an island race and it is not surprising that fish and shellfish from our shores have long been one of our staple foods. But what is surprising is the way that fashions and tastes change. What is scarce is always more desirable than what is plentiful - but how strange nowadays when salmon is so dreadfully expensive to think of the eighteenth-century Irish apprentices who looked on glumly as the great silver salmon leaped up the river Liffey, and insisted on marking in their indenture papers the number of days on which their masters could feed them this cheapest offish. Oysters too were the food of the poor, they were eaten not by the dozen and half-dozen then, but by the hundreds. (In fact they were so common that they were even made into sausages.)