What's in a name? When it comes to "lake trout" - that fried fish fare so unique to Baltimore it's almost a trademark - lies.
Two for starters.
Touted for decades on restaurant signs across the city, "lake trout" is filleted, breaded and deep-fried here at a clip of tons a week, then served up - usually in tin foil with two pieces of white bread - to customers who often assume that, based on its name, they are eating trout from a lake.
But "lake trout" is neither.
And if you are one of the few who already knows that, who has been told - perhaps by a frank fishmonger - that "lake trout" is actually "whiting," caught in the bay or ocean, well, that's not exactly right, either.
Brace yourself, Baltimore. As renowned as we are for our National Aquarium, our sidewalk fish sculptures, our Inner Harbor, oysters and crabs - a local seafood myth is about to sink.
What is sold here as "lake trout" is actually silver hake - merluccius bilinearis, to be scientific - an ocean-going, bottom-feeding, big-eyed, prickly toothed species belonging to the cod, or ganidae, family. They are caught mostly north of Connecticut and trucked to fish markets in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
"No doubt about it, it's silver hake" Martin Gary, fisheries ecologist for the state Department of Natural Resources, said after recently examining four "lake trout" supplied by The Sun.
The fish were purchased earlier that day from two fish markets where they were labeled as "lake trout," from fishmongers who, upon questioning, also identified them as whiting.
"Every fish got two names," explained Terrence Bell at Faidley's Seafood in Lexington Market. At Cross Street Seafood, the fishmonger was equally ambiguous. Asked if lake trout was from a lake, he said, "No, from the sea." Asked if his sea trout - several trays down - was from a lake, he said, "No, from the sea also."
Confused? Welcome to the murky waters of fish nomenclature, where little is clear other than:(a) there are, indeed, plenty of fish in the sea, and(b) there are even more aliases that they go by.
Scientists, fishermen, fish wholesalers and fish retailers have difficulty agreeing among themselves - much less with each other - what to call our finned friends. Throw in regional differences, and it gets even more perplexing.
Despite efforts to bring some uniformity to fish names, it's not getting any simpler, with fish being farmed outside their normal environments and marketers still coming up with new monikers for old fish.
Today, the Atlantic salmon you buy may actually be from the Pacific. That Chilean sea bass served in upscale restaurants? It's just a sexy-sounding alias for a creature whose real name is the Patagonian toothfish. What is known as striped bass in most of the free world is called rockfish in Maryland.
And, in and around Baltimore, somehow, an ocean-going, non-trout - in a state that has no natural lakes, no less - came to be called "lake trout." Beyond both being fish, it is no relation to the real lake trout, salvelinus namaycush, a species found in big lakes in the far north, Canada and Alaska.
Whether it was a result of deception or misunderstanding - or more likely a little of both - the name came to be applied to a totally different species in Baltimore, sometime in the first half of the 20th century.
"Somebody must have thought that sounded better," said Bill Sieling, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association. True lake trout is popular in the north among African-Americans, he noted, and they are the main consumers of "lake trout" in Baltimore.
"I don't want to say deceptive advertising - I'll call it mislabeling. Sometimes it just made sense, with a box of fish, to put a name on it that local people could identify with. If people buy it, and they're happy with it, that's the main thing. Who cares what it's called?"
While fish-sellers may, in part, have been trying to cash in on the popularity of true lake trout, most believe the more innocent account offered in Chesapeake Bay Cooking With John Shields.
Shields said the fish, which he called whiting, was brought to the docks in Baltimore by boats arriving late in the day. As workers unloaded it, they shouted, "Late trout." Amid the cacophony that was Baltimore's old fish market, some heard that as "lake trout," and the name stuck.
Fishmonger Jonathan Rich, who has worked at Faidley's for 26 years, also believes the name resulted from a misunderstanding, but said the fish was called late trout because they came in later in the year, closer to winter, after the sea trout season had ended. "I've heard the story from a number of fellow fishmongers," said Rich. "It's a popular story, but maybe it's not known by common man."
In fact, many people - Baltimore natives, even - are unaware that "lake trout" is not lake trout.
Dawn Jennings, with the media relations department of the National Aquarium in Baltimore, said that she ate lake trout all the time. "I thought it was trout from a lake."
"I never thought about whether it actually came from a lake or not," said Eddie Duffin, 37, heading back to his car with a sack in one hand, a soda in the other, after waiting in line for a lake trout sandwich at The Roost on Reisterstown Road. "That never concerned me. Where's any of it from? If it tastes good, that doesn't matter."
What is whiting anyway?
While most fish dealers, restaurants and even some customers will tell you that "lake trout" is actually whiting, few are willing or able to tell you what whiting is.
An initial call to the Reliant Fish Company, at the Maryland Wholesale Seafood Market in Jessup, did little to clear things up:
Q. Do you sell lake trout?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you sell whiting?
A. Yes.
Q. Are they the same thing?
A. Yes.
Q. What exactly is whiting?
A. A kind of fish.
Q. What type of whiting do you sell?
A. Small, medium and large.
Beth Tyler, managing editor of Fisheries, the magazine of the American Fisheries Society, based in Bethesda, checked her references and said: "The only species we have listed is the blue whiting (micromesistius poutassou), which sounds like an oxymoron to me."
The answer finally came from Teri Frady, chief of communications for National Marine Fisheries Service, which is a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She explained the confusion this way - outing "whiting" once and for all:
"There isn't a single fish that's a whiting, There are a bunch of different fish going by that common name. There are about six different fish people call whiting, and people are going to keep calling it whatever they call it. When I was a kid, I thought Spam was a farm animal. What are you going to do?"
South of Maryland, fishermen call kingfish "whiting;" north of it, they call silver hake "whiting." They are entirely different species, though. Whiting is neither a species nor a family, yet the Food and Drug Administration allows several fish to be sold under the name.
Even the state Department of Natural Resources wasn't sure what kind of fish was being sold here as "lake trout" - not too surprising, considering, as it turned out, the fish are not caught commercially in Maryland.
"We're of the opinion that those fish are hake, but probably the best thing to do would be to get a hold of one," said Eric Schwaab, director of fisheries service for DNR. "I have several people that would be good at identifying the species."
It didn't take much poking for Martin Gary to figure it out. Minutes after unwrapping four fish, he pronounced: "This is a no-brainer. It's silver hake." The fish, he said, is the only member of the cod family that has no chin barbel, making it easily identifiable.
Gary said about 80 percent of silver hake are caught off Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts by fishermen using bottom trawl rigs. It is trucked to fish markets in New York, Philadelphia and Jessup, where it is sold through markets and small restaurants or fry houses.
"They call it silver trout up here," said Joe Lasprogata, director of purchasing for Samuels and Son Seafood Co. in Philadelphia.
Lasprogata said that silver hake, though rarely sold under that name, is popular with "ethnic clientele" - both African-Americans, who know it as whiting or silver trout, and Italian-Americans, who call it merluz.
"It's a fish that's on the low end, cost-wise, a light fish that takes on the flavor of whatever it's breaded in," Lasprogata said.
Locally, no fish dealers interviewed - wholesale or retail - would acknowledge that "lake trout," a.k.a. whiting, is actually silver hake.
"It's whiting," said fishmonger Rich. "It's not like it's a secret or anything. Lake trout is just a local name."
If a customer asking for lake trout insists on real lake trout, Rich said, "I'll sell them rainbow trout, which, after all, is trout from a lake, or at least more likely from a lake than whiting. Most people don't care. It's a matter of it tastes good, I like it and that's that."
Said the DNR's Gary, "Retail merchants might know that fishermen call it whiting, and some might even know its true name is silver hake. But they probably think they can't market it as silver hake. It's just not an attractive name. With 'lake trout,' you envision this beautiful thing swimming in pure flowing waters, even though the fact is it's not a trout at all."
The name game
About 20 years ago, Doris Williams - whose background was in chicken, not fish - took knife in hand and prepared to behead her first "lake trout."
She had bought a former Burger Chef seven years earlier and turned it into The Roost, serving mostly fried chicken until a customer suggested she sell fish. She did some research, found out "lake trout" was the easiest fish to clean, and one of the most affordable, and bought 25 pounds of it for her restaurant.
"Then I realized, Lord, I don't know how to clean or cook a fish. I took one and went to cut his head off and I just stopped and looked at him." After the first one, though, it was easy - and "lake trout" quickly became a big seller. She bought twice as much the next day, and twice again as much the next. Now she sells tons of it - she doesn't want her competitors to know exactly how much - each week.
The fish cost 35 cents a pound when she first started buying it at the old fish market in downtown Baltimore, and it remains one of the most inexpensive. In the few weeks a year when the supply of "lake trout" runs out locally, she buys it in frozen filet form, drives to New York for it, or uses what is known as "oyster trout" as a substitute.
"You go with whatever you got," Williams said.
"Oyster trout" is another regional name. It is also known as "ling," but is actually another kind of hake. It is called oyster trout locally because of its color. In Philadelphia, in an even bigger stretch, it's known as "mountain trout."
"I'm not surprised this has come up," said Frady, of NOAA Fisheries. "One of the plagues of people who work in science is the proliferation of common names for species. "There's a market name, multiple names related to the market name, regional names, recreational anglers with another series of names that commercial fishermen might call something else. In the last 20 years, it has become more and more clear that there should be one common name for each."
That is the daunting task facing Joe Nelson, a biology professor at the University of Alberta, author of Fishes of the World, and chairman of the Committee on Names of Fishes. The committee was established in 1991 by the American Fisheries Society and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. It is expected to release its revised list, with more than 3,000 "acceptable North American fish names" early this year.
Need for standards
Nelson said calling both kingfish and silver hake whiting is an example of why a list of standardized names is needed.
"That's the trouble with the FDA names. Under the FDA list [of approved seafood names], a lot of fish can be sold under the name 'whiting.' They go by what the commercial fishermen have been calling something, so it mixes up completely unrelated fish and it all gets very non-specific."
The problem is not just an excess of names, he said, but the misuse of them.
"There are a lot of people who misuse names, but think they are using them the right way. We find when we talk to anglers, many of them are just hopelessly wrong. You can't convince them they are wrong - they learned it as a child, their father told them, so of course they're right."
The committee tries to avoid renaming a fish - even if its current name is misleading - because that would just add to the surplus of names. But it has renamed some, including two on the grounds that their names could be offensive.
Last year, the jewfish was renamed the goliath grouper, and three years ago, after complaints from Native American groups, the squawfish was renamed pikeminnow.
While the committee does receive petitions to change the names of fish that sound particularly unappetizing - "sucker, for example," he said - that is not considered a valid reason for an official name change.
Still, even within the restrictions of the FDA, marketers can use several names to describe the same fish, and going around those restrictions has been known to happen.
"Sometimes stores and restaurants do grossly bizarre, unethical, if not illegal things, using completely erroneous names so that the purchaser is misled," Nelson said.
As for Baltimore's "lake trout," as blatantly inaccurate as the name may seem, Nelson said it could be the result of a misunderstanding. "The origins of many fish names come from mispronunciations," he said. "There may have been no real mischievousness."
So don't expect a lake trout crackdown.
It's not likely any consumer organization will push to replace all the "LAKE TROUT" signs with "MERLUCCIUS BILINEARIS," or that the local band that adopted the name will start performing as Silver Hake.
"I don't think so," said Lake Trout guitarist Ed Harris.
The group, two of whose members grew up in Baltimore, chose the name because it was so distinctly Baltimore, Harris said. "You don't see lake trout anywhere else. But here, the signs are everywhere. It's just such a Baltimore thing."
Perhaps the name "lake trout" - for a fish that is neither - is so off-base, so quirky and such an ingrained piece of Baltimore kitsch, it should be exempt from further scrutiny. Besides, there is no ham in hamburger.
Perhaps we should let sleeping dogs - or, for that matter, dead fish from Rhode Island - lie.