By Alan Flippen From The New York Times

The Times has converted all of its 1964 issues into a digitized, searchable format. Each week, The Upshot will unearth an item from 50 years ago and put it in the light of today. “Food News: Fresh Halibut Now in Peak Supply” appeared on June 19 and can be seen in its original format on TimesMachine.

Halibut, known for “sparkling white flesh with an attractively sweet flavor,” was in peak season 50 years ago this week, The Times reported, offering both a description of the fish and a few suggestions for cooking it (use lots of butter when broiling or baking it, and put a little water in the pan so it doesn’t dry out).

There were two types of halibut, the article said, and the one from the Atlantic Ocean, with “a superior fat content,” was more expensive and presumably tastier.

Most of us will never know if that’s true: So little halibut is left in the Atlantic that it is generally off limits to commercial fishing, and environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the International Union for Conservation of Nature list it as endangered or threatened and warn against eating it.

Pacific halibut is still widely available, although less so than in 1964. About 31 million pounds of Pacific halibut were caught by United States and Canadian commercial fishing boats in 2012, just over half the 1964 total. The size of the fishery varies in natural cycles correlated with environmental conditions in the eastern Pacific when the fish are born, said Ian Stewart, a scientist with the International Pacific Halibut Commission, which manages the fishery. (Because the fish grow slowly, the current decline in the catch may reflect environmental conditions a decade or more ago.)

Also, because the commission focuses on the total number of fish taken from the ocean, it has brought down the level of the commercial catch as sport fishing for halibut in the region has become more popular, Dr. Stewart said.

We should note for the record here that the Times writer in 1964 appears to have been taken in by a fish story. She quoted a New England fish dealer who told of seeing an 825-pound halibut, but the world’s record for the Atlantic fish is only 418 pounds, and 459 pounds in the Pacific, according to the International Game Fish Association. (A 515-pound Pacific halibut said to have been caught last year has not yet been certified by the association as an official record.)

The Rise and Fall of the Pacific Halibut

The size of the commercial Pacific halibut fishery has oscillated quite a bit since 1964, falling by two–thirds from the 1960s to the 1970s, recovering and then falling again more recently. Scientists say the catch size is correlated to environmental conditions in the eastern Pacific when the fish are born.

See chart below:

For more on this story go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/upshot/when-halibut-was-plentiful.html?ref=earth&_r=1

IMAGE: www.portclydefreshcatch.com