North American Game Fish Cookbook

Blair Thompson was Adult Collections Co-ordinator at the North Vancouver District Library.

One of the several pluses of this freshwater and ocean fish cookbook is the inclusion of tasty recipes for fish that you may have wished never went for your lure — flounders, bullheads, and carp. Savaged by the hook, these fish often end up back in the water as piscatorial cadavers; so recipes like “Baked Bullhead” and “Carp Casserole” make a fishy virtue out of necessity for the gourmet angler.

In addition to a general index, the North American Game Fish Cookbook comes with an extensive and helpful substitution list, which tells whether it is permissible to use, for example, bass in a recipe that calls for halibut. This has the effect of multiplying many fold the over 200 recipes included.

Tips on preparation (flavour up a grilled fish by tossing a handful of rosemary, dill weed, or thyme into hot embers) plus advice on smoking, seasoning, and freezing, are followed by a chapter of recipes for sauces, stocks, cures, and stuffings which will help to retain natural moisture and balance flavour. Each game fish (salmon, trout, bass, pike, pickerel, etc.) has a chapter to itself, and the book includes “fish” that have legs, pincers, and tentacles: crayfish, crab, squid, and frog legs. The North American Game Fish Cookbook has nothing special to recommend it over 1983’s The Canadian Fish Cookbook, by A. Jan Howarth, a co-production of the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Douglas and McIntyre (the publisher here, incidentally), and it would have benefitted from some step-by-step “how to” illustrations on boning, scaling, filleting, shelling, and cracking, as provided in Howarth. Nonetheless, it is a fairly comprehensive paperback with a variety of both elaborate and easy-to-prepare recipes which should tempt the fish food fan to give Captain Highliner the occasional night off.