In case you were guessing, the little-known nutrient in seafood soups is NOT omega-3s. Everyone knows about the health benefits of omega-3s. I know it. You know it. Your mother knows it. My mother knows it. Every doctor, every health website and every major health organization has been telling us this for decades now. Heck […]

For decades we’ve been told mercury in seafood is a concern. On the surface, it sure makes sense. Though mercury occurs naturally in the environment, industrial sources like coal burning power plants increases mercury in the atmosphere which settles in our waterways and gets consumed by fish. Larger fish eat smaller fish and so it […]

What follows is an excerpt from my cookbook, New England Soups from the Sea. Though the book includes 80 recipes for chowders, bisques, stews, and medleys, only one, a Portuguese Shrimp Mozambique, features shrimp. That doesn’t mean we need to stop eating shrimp entirely. But I do want the reader to be aware of the […]

You might think that in New England, with its rich and storied relationship to the sea, there would be a deeper connection to local seafood than in most places. Eating with the Ecosystem, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote a place-based approach to sustaining New England’s wild seafood, set out to find out. In […]

Community Supported Fisheries (CSFs) are the seafood version of the increasingly popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs in which members of a community pay a one time upfront fee for a weekly share in a local farms’ seasonal output of fruits and vegetables. Similarly, in a CSF, community members pay upfront for a weekly or […]

A New England-style scallop stew is basically in the style of a traditional oyster stew. These old-time New England shellfish “stews” are not really stews but rather brothy soups made with a combination of broth and milk or cream. Oyster stew is by far the most famous because in the late 19th and early 20th […]

With all due respect to gumbo, cioppino is America’s most popular native seafood stew. Cioppino originated in San Francisco in the late 19th century with Italian immigrant fisherman who adapted similar native dishes, such as zuppa di pesce, into a unique tomato-based seafood medley. It has ventured far beyond its humble beginnings to become a […]

You know when you taste something from another country that is so incredible that it makes you contemplate, for a brief second, going straight to the airport and flying to that country just so you can eat it EVERY DAY?  That’s Zarzuela de Mariscos, a stupendously delicious Spanish seafood stew that is THAT good. Now, […]

There are times when the beauty in this life stops you dead in your tracks. A misty mountain vista with shades of blue and purple, a fiery orange sunset that lights up the sky, an uplifting piece of music. The same could be said of a New England bouillabaisse. When it’s done right, it’s like […]

Zuppa di Pesce, a tomato-based Italian fish soup, probably has as many variations as there are stars in the galaxy. Though it’s called a soup it’s more like a fish stew and usually also includes a variety of shellfish. My guess is that Zuppa di Pesce was the precursor to cioppino, the famous Italian-American seafood […]

People who like clams generally speaking you’ll fall into one of two categories: clam lovers and clam likers. Clam lovers can be summarized in four words: the brinier the better. They love raw clams on the half shell, steamers dipped in clam broth and the clammiest clam dishes you can possibly make. If that describes […]

The first time I made this recipe I made it the way everyone makes a mussel bisque. That is, you steam the mussels, strain the broth, remove the mussel meats from the shells and set them aside. Then you make the bisque. The reserved mussel meats are added whole at the end. Well, I didn’t […]