Growing up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, it was easy to take fresh seafood for granted. The bounty seemed endless: salmon, flounder, rockfish, shrimp, mussels, oysters … And not only did we regularly eat fresh-caught Dungeness crab; my dad caught it himself, walking through sea grass at the crack of dawn decked out in rubber waders.

Most of the rest of the delicious fresh seafood we enjoyed—salmon, clams, prawns—we acquired with the help of a middleman: the fishmonger. It seemed that whatever you wanted for dinner, the fish market folks could pull  it off ice, fillet it, weigh it, and wrap it in butcher paper in no time flat.

A good fishmonger can still do that, of course. But