By John Pappalardo
A mid-September event at Boston Fish Pier brought together first-class chefs from across Massachusetts to kick off what’s being called the “FLAT IS BACK” marketing campaign, to get flounders (flat fish for sure) back to their rightful place on dinner plates everywhere.
Our very own Doreen Leggett was there, and elsewhere in this issue you’ll see her typically excellent reporting on the doings.
Loving flounder, whenever the topic comes up I also enjoy adding linguistic ingredients to the conversation – not to be confused with adding linguine that flounder can top with great effect. That’s because no fish has as many names, denoting different varieties.
Witch flounder are most often caught and eaten around here, most celebrated and valuable, dragged up from bottom mud and sand like most. But often a mention will elicit a blank stare, and not because calling a fish a witch is strange. People know them by another name entirely: Grey sole, which some people confuse with the famous Dover sole from the English coast, but they’re different.
American plaice is a flounder all the way but rarely referred to that way at any time and plaice – sorry, place. The common name: Dabs.
Yellowtail flounder are similar to dabs though a little meatier, they like to come inshore to spawn in the spring and do have yellowish spots, sometimes a little yellow streak to the fillets. There can be a lot of them around, yet the odd thing is there isn’t much of a market price, even though fillets can be just as tasty as their more popular relatives. This is yet another commercial frustration.
Summer flounder like to be closer to shore, so this is a state fishery, few found farther off in federal domains. They have an unusual characteristic because they are southpaws; their two eyes on one side of their heads (a flounder common trait) look left while most others look right. If anyone gets confused, call them fluke.
Winter flounder tend to be thicker, hence more substantial fillets. They have a darker skin so guess what? They are known as blackbacks, or even lemon sole.
Sand dabs can be almost translucent, don’t have a lot of meat. They too are left-eyed.
Every one of these flounders has rules for harvest and management. This is true even though most of us couldn’t tell most of them apart as whole fish, let alone filleted. Fishermen, on the other hand, can separate them on-deck as fast as they cull haddock from cod, whiting from pollock – though even they would have a hard time knowing whether a finished fillet was cut from one or the other.
When I was a kid flounder was a Friday staple with breadcrumbs rolled up inside a fillet, maybe some Ritz crackers crushed on top, tucked side-by-side on a baking pan. Too often they were left in the oven too long, becoming mushy. That was a shame because they are such great eating, delicate, full of creative possibilities as this month’s event proved.
Why we stopped eating them had less to do with the conventional, staid way of traditional cooking, more because scarcity and overfishing forced regulators to curtail effort. Flounder dropped off the market, demand disappeared, so even as they make an offshore comeback consumer interest hasn’t resurrected.
As Doreen’s reporting shows, there’s a strong effort underway to remedy that. We welcome “FLAT IS BACK,” while at the same time reminding everyone that there is another flat fish, most abundant in local waters, also underappreciated, that deserves to be at the center of the plate too:
Skate.
(John Pappalardo is CEO of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance)