Chinese Cooking and Regional American Fish

When a Chinese cook is transplanted to American shores it always means discovering what’s available locally to supplant the huge variety of tasty and generally tiny fish and shellfish that abound in Chinese waters. With whole fish, especially, finding the right one can be a problem, as many Chinese recipes call for a fish that is about 2–2½ pounds, with a firm, white, meaty flesh.

I have lived East Coast and West, and these are the names I first look at: On the East Coast, bass, porgy, flounder, pompano, and red snapper. On the West Coast, Oregon black cod, the occasional fat perch or flounder, ling cod, and salmon. (Many West Coast Chinese cooks use rock cod, but it is a fish I simply do not like.) In between, there is walleyed pike and redfish and that is the lamentable extent of my firsthand knowledge.