My good friend Harald Zoschke photoshopped the above image for a birthday card for me a few years ago, and it points to a change in my writing career. For years I wrote every book I could think of about chile peppers and spicy food, and that will culminate in mid-March when the University of New Mexico Press publishes The Mexican Chile Pepper Cookbook by myself and José Marmolejo. I think that I’ve now exhausted that subject and I need a new focus for my writing. So, I chose seafood. Why, you ask, did I choose that subject? Well, I live in the desert now, but I grew up in Virginia eating and cooking seafood. I think that seafood–which also includes creatures that live in rivers and lakes–is mostly ignored in books and articles about food history, and that the seafood products industry is underserved in the media, lacking a trade/consumer show, a magazine, and a history blog about it. So we launched the Seafood Harvest blog, and started publshing some of my seafood history article like the one here on garum, that fermented Roman fish sauce that was the first seafood product in the world. We’re also going to publish my article on salt cod, which I’m almost done with. I now love writing about seafood, and since I’m also an avid fisher person, I have a lot of stories to tell about my fishing experiences around the world, like this one about catching the tastiest fish for sushi and sashimi, yellowtail.
So, if you’re a seafood lover too, check out Seafood Harvest and follow our progress as we track the history of los mariscos y pescados.
Fishy Business
