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Porpoise
This fish is often caught at sea by the crews of vessels, and its flesh makes a pleasant change from ordinary sea fare. It can be made into many appetising dishes if care is taken in the cooking. Soak the pieces of fish you are going to use in vinegar and water for an hour; they may then be fried as steaks or cutlets, or made into mincemeat, or curried. The liver, which tastes very much like pig's liver, may be fried with bacon. The meat from the back near the head is the most suitable for steaks and cutlets.
This entry cannot be followed today, and the reasons are legal as well as chemical.
- Not a fishThe porpoise is a cetacean — a marine mammal, warm-blooded, air-breathing, and closely related to dolphins and whales. The book's classification of it among fish reflects a culinary tradition rather than a biological one, and it is the reason the entry sits where it does.
- Protected in lawHarbour porpoises and their relatives are protected across essentially all the waters where this book circulated. In the United States the Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibits taking, possessing and selling them; in the United Kingdom and the European Union they are strictly protected species, and international trade is restricted under CITES. Landing or eating one is an offence, not a matter of taste.
- Contaminant loadAs a long-lived predator near the top of the marine food chain, the porpoise accumulates methylmercury, PCBs and organochlorine pesticides in its tissues at concentrations far above those found in the food fish sold today. Blubber and other fatty tissue carry the heaviest burden.
- The liver in particularThe recipe singles out the liver as tasting like pig's liver and suggests frying it with bacon. Mammalian liver concentrates heavy metals — cadmium and mercury especially — and in marine mammals the levels measured are among the highest recorded in any animal tissue. It is the worst part of the animal to eat, not the most tempting.
- What the vinegar soak was forAn hour in vinegar and water was most likely intended to cut the strong, oily, gamey flavour of dark mammalian muscle, which is dense with myoglobin and behaves in the pan more like beef or liver than like fish. It has no bearing on safety.
- If you want the dishThere is no substitute preparation to offer here. A current recipe for a dark, rich meat — beef or venison steaks, or a liver-and-bacon dish — will get you where this entry was pointing.
Porpoise had a long career on European tables before it had one in ship's galleys. Medieval and Tudor kitchens treated it as a fish for the purposes of fast days, which made it valuable eating during Lent, and it appears on grand English household accounts and feast rolls of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sometimes served with a mustard-based sauce. By the time Cassell's was compiled the dish had long since fallen out of domestic cookery, and the entry survives only as sailors' lore — advice for a crew that had killed one at sea and wanted relief from salt beef and biscuit. That framing is telling: the dictionary form obliged its editors to cover every flesh a reader might conceivably encounter, however remote from a London kitchen.