I was reading a lively piece by Rory Sutherland about how speed shouldn’t always be prioritized when I was stopped in my tracks by the parenthetical in the following passage:
Someone I know who is an expert at Transport for London found out that quite a lot of people, quite a lot of the time, actually enjoy commuting. They enjoy the commute home much more than the commute to work. Men enjoy it a bit more than women. (That’s because men are a bit like Sky Boxes—we’ve got a standby mode. We like a bit of staring. If you look at coarse fishing, 95% male. Why is that? Because coarse fishing is basically staring with equipment.)
I was so unfamiliar with the phrase “coarse fishing” that I thought maybe “coarse” was a typo for “course” (though I had no idea what “course fishing” might be either). But lo and behold: “Coarse fishing (Irish: garbhiascaireacht, Welsh: pysgota bras) is a phrase commonly used in Great Britain and Ireland. It refers to the angling for rough fish, which are fish species considered undesirable as food or game fish.” I presume my UK and Irish readers are familiar with the term; how about the rest of you? Is this one of those Gobsmacked! terms that’s started to percolate out into the wider world, or is it (like Marmite) largely confined to the home islands?
Yes, it’s very familiar here. (Though I’ve never felt any attraction to the actual practice.)
I’ve definitely heard the term, but I couldn’t have told you which fishing was coarse and which wasn’t – I think I vaguely thought it was salt- rather than freshwater.
Similar to Jen, but my ignorant guess would have been that it contrasted with fly fishing.
Is this one of those Gobsmacked! terms that’s started to percolate out into the wider world, or is it (like Marmite) largely confined to the home islands?
I live in a tiny hamlet that officially belongs to what styles itself as a “town” (pop. ~1750) in coastal Maine. Both local grocery stores stock Marmite. Masochism has spread beyond Blighty. They also carry HP Sauce, much to the delight of my East Midlands wife. And McVities, to assuage my craving for galletas María.
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Many consider that the plain flavour of Maries makes them, like rich tea biscuits, particularly suitable for dunking in tea. Other popular methods of consuming the biscuit include using two to make a sandwich with butter and Marmite or condensed milk spread in between; covering it with golden syrup; or crumbling it up in custard and jelly (gelatin dessert).
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“Spread” ? Even condensed milk is not sufficiently viscous for that. Is it stirred together with Marmite first ? Sounds pretty weird, all told.
Similar to Jen, but my ignorant guess would have been that it contrasted with fly fishing.
According to the Wikiparticle, it does, as flies are used for trout and salmon, and baits for “coarse fish”.
I knew the term only because I’d seen it, maybe in the NSOED (one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever gotten), while looking up something else. I think that in North America, fly fishers can consider their kind of fishing superior, but seldom to the point of not calling pike, muskellunge, or bass “game fish”.
And I want to know whether “rough fishing” means fishing for coarse fish.
Whoever wrote that coarse fish – not trout or salmonids – are undesirable as food has never eaten perch, pike or zander. Or, by Polish or mediaeval monastic standards, carp.
Not to mention eel, stewed in red wine or smoked.
I gather that they’re “undesirable as food” according to the standards of the traditional English aristocracy, not the peoples of the world at large.
Re Stu’s confusion about spreadable milk, I refer him to the locus classicus from A.A. Milne: ‘“Honey or condensed milk with your bread?” [Pooh] was so excited that he said, “Both,” and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, “but don’t bother about the bread, please.”’
I have known this since childhood and never managed to reconcile it very well with the consistency of condensed milk with which I was personally familiar so have always assumed it was some mysterious British thing.
> I gather that they’re “undesirable as food” according to the standards of the traditional English aristocracy, not the peoples of the world at large.
Which may make “coarse” more transparent?
Much fishing in our pond* is catch and release, therefore not for food regardless of the fish. Would that qualify as coarse?
* The American one that Brits fish on the wrong side of.
@Stu / JWB: I guess what is meant is something like the treacly, sugared condensed milk the Russians call сгущёнка?
@Hans et al. Sounds like dulce de leche, very popular in South America.
It’s a long time since I’ve had condensed milk, but I think it would be kind of spreadable – it might try to run off, but it wouldn’t soak straight through. Maybe it’s more condensed here?
Having read the rest of the wiki article, they do seem to mean ‘considered less desirable as food’ rather than ‘not desirable at all’.
I’m with the gentry on this: salmon is just about the only fish I actually like to eat.
(Just got round to reading TFA. Very good …)
From Ulysses, Cyclops episode:
“In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gunnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated.”
Brill!
Michael Green, a British humorist, produced a whole series of books beginning with The Art of Coarse Rugby, which described the activities of amateur and weekend players for whom the game was mainly an excuse to drink beer in the clubhouse afterwards.
There is in fact a book with the title The Art of Coarse Fishing, but it’s not by Green but by some earnest fellow who provides instruction and advice on wielding a rod and reel.
I suspect that the condensed milk of A. A. Milne’s time was probably a lot closer in consistency to what is sold in Britain as “clotted cream” today. I had some English friends who bemoaned their inability to buy clotted cream in America, so we located a very traditional recipe for the stuff and mastered making it. When we tried to serve it, our friends were horrified and said they had never seen anything like the stuff we had produced.
@David L, thank you! ‘The Art of Coarse Fishing’ (I think the earliest might be Claypoole 1955 Introduction to …) and it’s various spoofs are what I immediately thought of.
Errk no. Bazley 1932.
@DE: What’s TFA?
I once saw condensed milk on toast offered for breakfast at a Hong Kong Chinese restaurant in New York Chinatown. It brought Winnie the Pooh to mind.
@Hans: Trout Fishing in America.
I read an article about the puzzlement of British anglers on seeing Polish immigrant anglers take home pike to eat. They said it was like eating cotton wool filled with needles.
@Hans:
Stu is correct.
The acronym was popularised by Slashdot.
@de
Too bad. I thought it was “The F* Angler”, an update of “the Compleat Angler” for the 21st C.
Re mediaeval gentry and their taste in coarse fish, especially pike: see an expert on the subject, Angela Maccarinelli, Archeol. Anthropol. Sci 13: 131, 2021
“Historical sources report that some species of freshwater fish were considered luxury food items in England during the Middle Ages. The high retail price associated with species such as pike, salmon and sturgeon, as well as restrictions of fishing rights on rivers, estuaries and natural and artificial ponds, proves their exclusivity and role as symbols of social privilege …. From historical sources dated to the 11th–15th c. AD, we know that species such as freshwater bream (Abramis brama), pike (Esox lucius), perch (Perca fluviatilis), burbot (Lota lota), sturgeon (Acipenser sp.) and salmon (Salmo sp.) were typically expensive and/or highly valued, while other species, like eel or small Cyprinidae (carps and minnows), were sold cheaply at the market.”
The first three valued fish would nowadays be reckoned coarse fish in England; burbot would too, were they not extinct.
Incidentally, “cottonwool stuffed with needles” is a phrase usually applied to chub, not the highly edible pike.
Russian сгущёнка “might try to run off, but it wouldn’t soak straight through”.
I never treid to “spread” it over anything, though.
It did not occur to me when I was 4 or when it was that I read Winnie-the-Pooh, but the fact that we have both a translation and the stuff here in Russia (and 4 year olds understand perfectly what it is) is surprising.
I in turn was surprised by Rabbit’s habit of consuming it with bread: it is better without bread. (Pooh agrees)
@stu, DE: Thanks!
I think Stu might have been in Cologne so long that he’s been seduced by German false friends. I haven’t a clue about ‘condensed milk’ in the US but in the UK it is a substance so viscous by virtue of being full of sugar that it is sold in tubes, like toothpaste. German ‘Kondensmilch’ is English ‘evaporated milk’, still much favoured in Cologne by elderly ladies in their coffee.
What’s TFA?
The Fucking Article. Ignore Stu’s japery and DE’s sly collusion.
The clotted cream I saw once was basically butter. I didn’t try it, though.
@Brian: German ‘Kondensmilch’ is English ‘evaporated milk’, still much favoured in Cologne by elderly ladies in their coffee.
That’s the one ! I thought I remembered only “condensed milk” from the States, but maybe “evaporated milk” was out there too. My memory is no doubt impaired by the fact that I found it revolting, no matter what lexemes it hid behind.
The better sort of elderly lady here requires the stuff in a small mock-silver jug, which is filled off-stage from a tin of Bärenmarke Kaffeetraum.
I always feel like evaporated milk should be some kind of powder.
It’s only reasonable. I always feel like acids should be liquid, not powders as some are at room temperature. Ascorbic acid fr’instance.
Ignore Stu’s japery and DE’s sly collusion.
Can you trust no-one anymore? Even in these hallowed halls?
Especially in these hallowed halls!
In the US, condensed milk is sweetened, and evaporated milk is not.
A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gunnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the mixed coarse fish generally…
I am struggling to understand the piscine ecosystem that Joyce is conjuring here. Murmuring waters make me think of river pools or the shores of small lakes; the fishful streams are presumably freshwater brooks of some sort. However, the plaice, the halibut, the dab, the brill and the flounder are all flatfish that inhabit relatively shallow coastal seas; the roach is a freshwater fish; a haddock is a common enough saltwater fish, but what a gibbed haddock might be I cannot determine; the grilse is a salmon that has been to sea for but one year; and of the gunnard Google knoweth not (there is something called the red gurnard, an ocean fish).
Moreover, I find it hard to imagine flatfish ‘sporting’ in any environment, since they sidle about on the seabed and try to make themselves inconspicuous.
I wonder if any Joyce scholar has consulted a biologist on this matter.
A pleasant land it is, where authors pull legs and bulls frolic, blessing the land with fragrant dung…
@David L:
Joyce is channelling the spirit of traditional mediaeval Celtic literature*; for the authors thereof, Eh, tu blagues! was the kind of positive response they were looking for.
The passage also contains the ultimate description of ordering a pint of Guinness in a pub. It is unsurpassed in the literature of mankind**, and likely to remain so. It should have been included on the Voyager probe.
* And (just conceivably) taking the piss out of a certain kind of Irish nationalism (and its associated cultural paraphernalia.)
** Though Flann O’Brien’s account (in At Swim-Two-Birds) of Suibne Geilt’s bidding at poker is almost as good.
Decoding the mock-epic depiction of banal Dublin, I guess in 1904 there was a fishmonger or fish market near St Michan’s Church where the diverse species lay side by side The controversial 1980s Corrected Text changed “gunnard” to “gurnard”, though IMO “red gunnard” is Googlably common enough to count as a variant rather than an error.
coarse fishing is for the working class, game fishing (trout, salmon) for the aristocrats. Pike fell in between as some aristocrats liked fishing for them in the offseasons from game fishing. So my understanding is this is very much a UK usage.
In the colonies (S. Africa) we were aware of the term but it was not used locally, as we didn’t have any aristocrats and trout were available even for us plebs.
In the USA the approximately equivalent term is rough fish. Generally bass, walleye (them’s good eating) and trout are not rough, but the classifications are regional. Gar are a pest in the Midwest, but a delicacy in Lousiana. Governor Tim Walz signed a MN law in July, to give native ‘rough fish’ the same kind of basic fisheries protections, limits and so on, as the desirables.
Joyce is channelling the spirit of traditional mediaeval Celtic literature
Bien sûr. Et plus ça ne change pas, plus c’est autre chose.
Wait, you are telling me that Mr. Joyce makes things up, and is given to flights of fancy? Heavens to Betsy!
Alas yes, David L. The decline of the novel, is what it iswas.
The OED has:
gib, v.2 To disembowel (fish); = gip v.
or
gib, n.3 The hooked gristle which grows at the end of the lower jaw of a male salmon after spawning; = kip n.2
The second is obviously referring to the wrong kind of fish, but that seems fairly consistent…
@Jen in Edinburgh: The “disembowel” sense of gib is always what I have taken to be partially the origin of the video game sense of the verb gib (especially prominent in the context of first-person shooters) meaning: “blow (an in-game enemy) into pieces.” The other influence was probably giblets, especially in its longstanding slang sense of “innards, more specifically intestines.” There is a noun form, necessarily plural, gibs, meaning “the bloody bits of a blown up game character.”
The second meaning is used with other fish, i.e., gibbed herring. So I would not find it strange with haddock. It is just that, although it is possible to see whole herring on display at a fishmonger, you would typically see only fillets for cod, herring, hake. But maybe Joyce was thinking of a dockside market stall or buying off a fishing boat, or maybe the fishmonger displayed whole gibbed haddock.
So coarse fishing involves staring at the water with equipment (in hand), i.e., a fishing rod.
And “coarse fishing” on the train involves staring at women with equipment in hand?
Have I got that right?
A complement serves to enhance experience. In this sense, Bathrobian coarse fishing is fishing for complements.
Off coarse.