The Tale of Scup and Butterfish: Please Don't Call Them Trash

Few Rhode Islanders know that Point Judith, or Galilee, carved its way into the seafood trade by catching and selling fish no one else really wanted. Sure, boats still landed trips of codfish and yellowtail flounder, but the port—all the infrastructure, from the fish plants to the ice houses; all the hustle and bustle that one sees on the waterfront—came from the sales of fish that few Americans ever thought about: scup and butterfish, whiting or squid.

For many years, all through the ‘60s and well into the ‘70s, even Rhode Island fishermen called them trash fish—or swill. These fish were worth pennies a pound. When the boats landed them, the fish were ground up for meal, en masse. Most Point Judith fishermen who were there in the early years would agree that people in other more traditional cod and flounder ports—New Bedford, Boston, Portland and Gloucester—looked down at Point Judith as a swill port, a port trying to figure out how to make a dollar selling so-called underutilized species, until money was made.

Yet even today, decades after Point Judith fully entered the fish trade, you need to have a real desire (or local knowhow) in order to purchase butterfish, scup or whiting in this state, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of pounds of each are landed here every year.

Why are these fish hard to find locally? It has nothing to do with abundance—the stocks are healthy and the quotas often allow for nearly year-round harvest.

Squid is really the only one that can be readily found in the local marketplace. Interestingly, after only 25 years, Rhode Island squid has gone from dumpster product to a domestic and international player in seafood sales. It has, in a very short time, made Point Judith the largest squid port on the eastern seaboard. But that’s another story, worthy of more ink than can be given here. Same goes for whiting—that sleek silver fish that’s in the codfish family—delicious if bought fresh off the boat but often soft and listless when not.

Butterfish

Butterfish almost by itself built the port of Galilee. This very simple fish, going about its ways in the deeper waters south of Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, small, flat in shape, like a minnow pressed into a pancake. With skin brighter than a polished quarter, a fish worth close to nothing per pound, it seemingly overnight became a sensation in Japan—a near-delicacy that was craved by enough people to drive the market.

Butterfish took off like a garage band with no gigs one day that finds itself headlining Gillette Stadium the next. For a solid decade, Rhode Island sellers were the link with butterfish buyers in the two key Japanese cities of Numazu and Oarai. The buyers wanted not just any butterfish. They wanted a specific butterfish, one that was full of fat but with an empty stomach. They wanted the fish to be soft, like butter. The fish were put on auction in Japan where they were graded for quality. The best fish fetched the highest prices.

Once purchased, the Japanese would take the fish and butterfly cut them. Salt was added and the fish were dried on wooden racks—millions of pounds of them. After this process, the fish were grilled and served, often for breakfast.

“We’d eat them like Americans eat eggs,” said Hitoshi Toyama, a Rhode Island fish buyer who moved to Rhode Island from Japan in the 1980s to be a link from here to there. “They are a very good fish.”

Then, as quickly as it had started, the boom was over. The heavy fishing pressure drove the size of the butterfish down. That, along with a Japanese recession, plus buyers unwilling to pay the higher prices. Buyers began looking elsewhere for a new fish that could fill the butterfish niche. They found one with a horse mackerel from northern Europe, which the Japanese called saba.

“That was it,” said Glenn Goodwin, co-owner of Seafreeze, a North Kingstown seafood processor. “The bulk of the Japanese population that grew up with butterfish on their plates now had horse mackerel. Their taste buds began to change. They started to forget about the flavor of butterfish. Now we’re trying to get that market back. It isn’t easy. It takes time.”

The export market for butterfish still exists but at a much smaller scale. Much of the butterfish that remain in the domestic market are sold in Asian markets and restaurants, often in the big cities.

Can more New Englanders eat them locally—where they are caught? It’s hard to say. Right now, butterfish remain an unfamiliar fish to most home cooks—but if tilapia rose to fame in a mere decade, going from unheard of to the fourth most consumed fish product in this country, then why not butterfish? Plus it’s completely pure, nothing added, no genetic modification like many farmed fish.