Fish

OF THE HUNDREDS OF FISH that issue from American waters, I know most by name only, a shameful lacuna that I share with most Americans. A livresque acquaintanceship breeds frustrations, not only because a valuable judgment depends on getting ahold of the thing, feeling it and tasting it, but also because of our maddening habit of naming fish: A number of different fish may share a single name or a single fish may be known by a number of different names, some of which inevitably apply to other fish as well. Webster defines “bass” as “any of numerous edible spiny-finned fishes”—presumably the striped sea bass is that which most resembles that French Atlantic bar or the Mediterranean loup, but there is, as well, a fresh-water fish called striped bass and an ocean fish called black bass (as a child I loved a lake fish that we called black bass . . .); “sole” (genuine sole is called “Dover” and does not exist in American waters) apparently means any flat fish of Picassoesque profile; whiting, silver hake, sea mullet, kingfish, and Pacific hake would seem, to some mysterious extent, to be interchangeable appellations—although silver hake, according to my sources, grows to a size of 3 or 4 pounds (and is probably the whiting with which I am familiar and which is nearly identical to the French merlan) and kingfish to 30 pounds . . . And so forth.