Forever fishing

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Remember the good old days when the only thing you needed to know when you were shopping for fish was “bright bulging eyes and firm flesh”? Today, you practically have to take a checklist along with you when you go to the market.

Which fish are endangered by overfishing, and according to whom? Which fish are dangerous to you because of mercury or other kinds of contamination? Sure, farm-raised salmon is renewable and cheap, but what about all of those claims that it is spoiling the ocean?

Thank goodness for Paul Johnson’s new book, “Fish Forever.” Certainly, no one has more credibility on the topic than Johnson. A onetime restaurant cook, he went into the fish business in 1979 at the urging of Alice Waters and now his Monterey Fish Market seems to supply half the restaurants in the Bay Area, including Chez Panisse, Zuni Café and the French Laundry — and that’s in addition to its retail outlet deep in the heart of Berkeley’s gourmet ghetto. Johnson is one of the few people in the fish business to have earned the respect of both the fishing industry and the environmentalists.

“Fish Forever” is at the same time a cookbook and a guidebook.

There are recipes and descriptions of cooking techniques, but there is also all the information you need to make informed choices when you go shopping for dinner. Perhaps the best example is the chapter on swordfish — a fish around which there always seems to be a controversy swirling.

Johnson first tells you how to choose (harpooned whenever possible, tight bloodline, flecks of fat), and lays out the facts on both the Atlantic and Pacific fisheries. (After being declared near collapse in 1998, by 2002 the Atlantic fishery had almost entirely recovered; Pacific stocks are believed to be healthy.)

Then he addresses concerns about mercury. (They apply to pregnant women and children only; occasional eating of swordfish presents little danger.) And he even addresses prickly issues of kosher law (a subject of some debate since swordfish have scales when young, but they disappear in maturity). Then he gets into the cooking (the belly is the best part; the spinal cord is considered a delicacy; scraps are cheap and perfect for brochettes) and recipes (grilled swordfish with caponata). It’s enough to make cooking fish fun again.

“Fish Forever” by Paul Johnson (Wiley, $34.95).

-- Russ Parsons