From whale curry to salmon skewers: How British seafood diversity collapsed in a century

A century ago, British home cooks were willing to try almost anything that came from the sea. They made oyster cocktails and lobster canapés. They baked fish in custard. During the Second World War, when the Ministry of Food needed to stretch protein supplies, they followed recipes for curried whale meat. By the 1960s, they were preparing plaice véronique and chilled prawn soup. The kitchen was a place of seafood adventure, constrained only by what the fishmonger had that day and what the recipe book suggested.

That world has nearly vanished. A researcher at the University of Exeter spent months combing through a century of British Good Housekeeping magazine—from 1923 to the present—cataloguing every fish and shellfish recipe the publication had ever printed. What Ruth Thurstan found was a story of dramatic narrowing. Over the past hundred years, British cooks encountered 67 different fish and shellfish species in the magazine's pages. Today, just five dominate: cod, haddock, tuna, salmon, and prawns. Since the 1970s, these five have accounted for more than 60 percent of all seafood mentions in recipes. Everything else has faded to the margins.

The shift happened in stages. Before 1970, the recipes reflected genuine diversity. Flatfish, herring, and oysters appeared regularly. Cooks were encouraged to buy whole fish and learn the skills to prepare them—economy and self-sufficiency were built into the instructions. Then came the 1970s, a turning point. The big five began their ascent. Herring, oyster, and lobster—species that had anchored British seafood cooking for generations—started disappearing from the magazine's pages. By the 1980s and beyond, the pattern had solidified. The big five were everywhere. Everything else was nearly gone.

What makes this shift particularly striking is that it was not driven by scarcity. Herring can still be bought. Oysters are still available. Lobster has not vanished from British fishmongers. Thurstan's research suggests something else was at work: a narrowing of what people were being shown and encouraged to cook. The magazine, as a mirror of aspirational home cooking, stopped featuring these species. Readers stopped seeing them in recipes. The connection between kitchen and catch was quietly severed.

The consequences ripple outward. According to the Marine Stewardship Council, the big five now make up 80 percent of all fish and seafood consumed in the UK. This concentration carries environmental weight. Cod and haddock fishing can damage valuable marine habitats. Shrimp trawling has similar impacts. Salmon farming, which now supplies much of the salmon on British tables, has drawn intense scrutiny from conservation groups over its ecological footprint. When a nation's seafood diet narrows to five species, the pressure on those five intensifies. The diversity that once spread the burden across dozens of populations is gone.

Thurstan has begun testing some of the recipes she uncovered. She tried fish baked in custard—a 1920s dish that sounds sweeter than it actually is—using pollack instead of the original cod or halibut. She found it had potential, though perhaps it needed a new name to signal what it actually was. She is planning to attempt oyster soup and kipper cream, a 1930s preparation that involved parboiling a kipper and pounding it with butter, lemon juice, vinegar, and cayenne until it reached a smooth consistency. She suspects it would taste much like today's mackerel paté, and just as good.

The research, which will be published in the journal People and Nature, documents something that happened quietly in British kitchens over fifty years. No law was passed. No shortage forced the change. Instead, a magazine—and by extension, the culture it reflected and shaped—gradually stopped showing people how to cook the seafood their grandparents had known. The recipes changed. The readers followed. And a century of culinary possibility narrowed down to five familiar names on a fishmonger's counter.