Nova Scotia Seafood Cookery: From Canada's Atlantic Playground, the Fabled Bounty of the Deep

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

The arrangement of this book is by type of fish and shellfish; 24 varieties are included, and there are recipes for each, totalling some 600. Most of the recipes, however, are taken from a wide variety of sources — that is, very few originated with the Nova Scotian government and very few are actually “Canadian” or “Nova Scotian.” The acknowledgments page reveals that 71 recipes are from The Art of Fish Cookery (Doubleday, 1949), 66 recipes from The Lobster’s Fine Kettle of Fish (Citadel, 1968), 30 recipes from The Long Island Seafood Cookbook (Dover reprint), and 25 recipes from The Mussel Cookbook (Harvard University Press, 1977), as well as some from various government pamphlets (about two dozen other sources are listed). All the classics are here from French, Italian, Greek, and Chinese cuisines (boiled lobster, oyster chowder, planked salmon, etc.). The opening chapters discuss many useful procedures — such as planking and curing (salting, drying, smoking, pickling, potting) — as well as cooking techniques and accompaniments. But the index is totally useless since it repeats the table of contents in paginated order, and not in alphabetical order. Still, if you don’t have any fish cookbooks this one represents good value in terms of the number of recipes.