Kipper cream or fish in custard? A century of magazine recipes reveals how Britain’s seafood tastes have narrowed

Walk into a British supermarket and you will see prawns from south-east Asia, salmon from Norway, lobster from Canada and tuna from the Indian Ocean.

Seafood is among the most traded foods globally, yet around 80% of the seafood British consumers eat comes from just five species groups: cod, haddock, salmon, tuna and prawns.

It’s tempting to assume Britain has long been a nation of cautious fish eaters with a few trusted favourites. Histories of certain species, such as cod (the mainstay of the national dish, fish and chips) and herring (kippers on toast, anyone?) can reinforce that narrative. But my new research exploring a century of recipes from one of Britain’s longstanding domestic magazines suggests a different story.

Records of which fish people cooked at home are surprisingly patchy. Retail data are mostly short term and commercially owned, while long-running household surveys rarely record fish to species level. National statistics track what is landed and traded, but the home kitchen, where food choices are made and lifelong habits are formed, leaves far fewer traces.

Recipes offer a window into this hidden past. They don’t measure what people ate, but they do show which fish readers were expected to recognise, be able to buy and want to cook. Britain’s fish supply and trade have changed dramatically over the past century, so I wondered whether the fish in recipes had changed too.

British Good Housekeeping magazine was first published in the 1920s and continues today as Good Housekeeping UK. Its focus on home life and steady output of recipes make it well suited to tracking changing food culture. Sampling several years per decade, I collected 1,192 fish and shellfish recipes published from 1923-2025.

Recipes published in the 1920s reflect a broad and flexible fish culture. Sole, oysters, shrimp and salmon appeared alongside halibut, lobster and herring, in dishes such as oyster cocktails with olives, kipper cream and halibut steaks in milk. Almost a third of recipes included suggestions for substitute species. Some recipes (such as fish baked in custard) simply called for fish or white fish, probably because supply was not always predictable.

From the 1950s, that flexibility gave way to more standardisation. Recipes increasingly assumed prepared fillets rather than whole fish, and frozen products became common.

The 1970s marked a turning point. From then on, cod, haddock, salmon, tuna and prawns accounted for the most species mentions each decade, while sole, herring, oysters and lobster appeared less often. My research shows the number of fish species represented in recipes in each decade didn’t collapse, but attention became concentrated on fewer of them.

Shifting staples

What explains the shift? Supply matters, but the picture is more complicated. Cod declined in British waters but remained a recipe staple, as distant water fleets and then imports kept it on sale. Herring and oyster populations also declined but did not disappear from markets entirely, yet they faded from the magazine’s pages. What stayed familiar depended less on what our local fleets caught than on increasingly globalised supply chains and marketing.

Within this glossy monthly magazine, at least, fish recipes are more globally adventurous than ever: recent examples include gochujang sticky cod and miso prawn skewers. Yet the fish remain largely the same five. Britain’s cooking globalised, but the range of fish within these pages stayed narrow.

British boats, including many small vessels, land a diverse mix of locally caught fish and shellfish, but much of that is exported. In contrast, most of the fish eaten today is imported.

Britain’s narrow appetite for fish is often assumed to be a long-standing cultural norm. These recipes suggest otherwise. Viewed through this lens, modern preferences look less like an enduring national trait and more like an outcome of changing supply, trade and food retail. This raises the intriguing possibility that eating habits may be more open to change than previously thought.

One magazine can only reveal so much. Good Housekeeping was written for a particular readership. Its recipes show what was visible and aspirational, not what was prepared and eaten. But unlike specialist fish cookbooks, which are aimed at people already keen on fish, a mass market magazine shows which fish were put in front of ordinary home cooks.

A century ago, British cooks expected the fish on offer to change with the seasons and the catch. Reviving that flexibility, and a taste for local, sustainably caught seafood (such as sardines, pollack or mussels) could benefit our seas and coastal communities. Some suppliers are already pioneering this approach, but it needs to reach the mainstream.

Recipes written with versatility in mind won’t secure the future of Britain’s fish stocks and fishing communities alone, but, combined with thoughtful choices by suppliers and shoppers, they could be a (very enjoyable) step in the right direction.