Fish & Seafood

We increasingly have adopted the barbecue as the cooking icon of summer but, in doing so, have tended to embrace the American rather than Mediterranean ethos - with an emphasis on meat rather than fish. The smell which hangs like a pall over a sunny evening in suburbia is of charred animal flesh, interwoven with the whiff of kerosene. It is rarely of fish and herbs, is more crematorium than taverna.

The reasons for this carnivorous bias are not hard to work out and are largely historic. Meat was always considered better fare than fish, a food downgraded by its association with fasting. Indeed, fish on Fridays is an enduring habit based on its designation as a meat-free day in the Catholic calendar and a penance by definition. Oysters, herring and salmon were for hundreds of years the food of the poor; a role that low - grade quality farmed salmon can now ironically play again, with prices plummeting below that of broiler turkeys. Fish was something you fed invalids. With multiple unpleasant connotations, it is not surprising that so many of our countrymen stand with their backs to the sea.