There's a recipe from January 1923 in the archive: fish baked in custard, the custard unsweetened, the fish a slice of cod or halibut, the whole thing baked in a bain-marie until lightly browned. Ruth Thurstan from the University of Exeter tried it with pollack. She thinks, with a name change, it has potential. The recipe is a small window into a world where British domestic cooks thought nothing of working with flatfish, herring, oysters, lobster — whatever the market offered. That world is mostly gone. Thurstan spent considerable time with the British edition of Good Housekeeping, running from 1923 to the present, cataloguing more than 1,000 seafood recipes. She found 67 species represented across that century. She also found that since the 1970s, five of them — cod, haddock, tuna, salmon, and prawns — have come to account for more than 60% of all recipe mentions. The Marine Stewardship Council puts the figure higher for actual consumption: the big five make up 80% of all fish and seafood eaten in the UK. The three-phase story Thurstan maps is clean. Before the 1970s, recipes were genuinely diverse — flatfish, herring, and oyster were prominent, and the emphasis was on domestic economy and preparing whole fish. The 1970s marked a turn: diversity declined, the big five started their ascent. From the 1980s onward, concentration accelerated. This wasn't driven by disappearance — herring, oyster, and lobster can still be bought — but by what readers were being shown and encouraged to cook. Recipes shaped demand as much as they reflected it. The wartime 1940s archive is its own chapter. The Ministry of Food placed recipes explicitly pushing fish consumption as a protein source during rationing. Among them: curried whale meat. The distance from that moment to gochujang sticky cod in the 2020s is not just culinary — it's a map of how a culture processes scarcity, aspiration, and the narrowing effects of industrial food supply on collective imagination. The environmental logic is worth stating plainly. Thurstan notes that cod, haddock, and shrimp fishing can damage valuable habitats, while salmon farming has attracted sustained scrutiny. Concentrating 80% of consumption on five species doesn't just homogenize the dinner table — it concentrates ecological pressure on a small number of fisheries and farming systems at industrial scale. The 1930s oyster soup and kipper cream recipes in the archive aren't just curiosities; they represent distributed demand across a wider set of species that no longer exists. The research is due in the journal People and Nature. Its methodological elegance is that it uses a popular lifestyle magazine — not industry data, not fisheries statistics — as a proxy for what domestic cooks were being invited to imagine. That's a genuine insight about how cultural infrastructure shapes behavior. Published recipes are not neutral mirrors of taste; they are active propositions about what cooking looks like, and Good Housekeeping was making those propositions to millions of readers for a century. Thurstan is planning to try the kipper cream. Her read: pound a parboiled kipper with melted butter, lemon juice, and cayenne until it reaches a cream consistency. She thinks it would be similar to today's mackerel pâté, and just as good. She's probably right. The ingredients were never the problem.
