Rock Salmon

... is basically a marketing name, used in fish and chip shops (mainly in south east England) for various species of fish – especially the dogfish, which is a type of shark – to make it sound more appetising.

An article in the online Daily Mail, dated July 2014, gets very hot under the collar about this.

Well ... I don't know if July 2014 was a particularly slow news month, but I thought everybody knew.

Apparently not: "the popular fish known as rock salmon – which most people understandably believe to be a type of salmon – has us fooled." "Sharks are fish [no, really?], but most customers at a fish and chip shop wouldn't imagine for a second that they'd be served it."

The Mail article lists all of the synonyms given as alternative answers to the MQL question. (You can find lots more on the Internet, if you look hard enough.) But for clarification, I naturally turned to our old friend Wikipedia.

Huss, it tells us, is "Various fish species ... also known as 'Rock salmon' in the UK fish and chip trade". Flake is "an Australian term for edible flesh of one of several species of shark". Rock eel means the same as rock salmon (as do huss and flake) – "a dish popular in Britain, based on shark, often served as part of a fish and chips supper." The catshark is a family of sharks, very similar to the dogfish. Rigg is a little more elusive; it's listed by The Shark Trust (along with Flake, Rock, Huss, Dogfish and Rock Eel) as a "marketing name" for shark meat; but my browser wouldn't let me visit this site as it didn't think it was configured properly. And finally the nursehound is a species of catshark, also known as the large– or greater–spotted dogfish, or the bull huss.

Seriously ... it's all too easy to mock the Daily Mail, but the involvement of the Shark Trust reminds us that there's a serious side to all this, which is that several of these species are endangered.

And that's a much more valid reason to be wary of rock salmon than the fact that it isn't actually salmon.

(Not for the Mail, though: "Even more than shark welfare, what will most concern people tucking into seaside dinners this summer is the realisation that they're being conned.")