Fin-to-gill eating: how to cook fish without discarding a thing

When it comes to fish, in Britain we rarely eat anything other than fillets and discard everything else. Now a new breed of chefs is trying to encourage a more adventurous approach

Sweetmeats. Tripe. Tongue. You may not have been eating them since 1994, when the chef Fergus Henderson brought us the gospel of eating animals “nose to tail” via his London restaurant St John, but many have. His mantra, and his menu of lamb brains and bone marrow, spawned not only a resurgence in offal, but – more recently – an equivalent philosophy for plants: “root to fruit”. Carrot peel, cauliflower leaves, broccoli stems and more have been elevated from compost to plate in a drive to cut food waste that makes Josh Niland’s new The Whole Fish Cookbook almost inevitable. “People keep asking me: ‘Why fish? Why now?’ – but it’s just logical,” says Niland. The time to eat “fin to gill” is long overdue.