The Pollock Species
Boston Fish House Recipes, 1940s
The American pollock is a shapely fish with deep, plump body (about four and one-fourth times as long as deep) tapering to a pointed nose. Pollock are always of a greenish hue, usually deep rich olive or brownish green above, paling to yellowish or smoky gray on the sides below the lateral line and to silvery gray on the belly. Small fish are darker than large ones and often more tinged with yellow on their sides.
Pollock, unlike cod and haddock, are most abundant in the coastal belt from close to land out to about the 75-fathom contour. Though pollock are seldom reported over the deep basin they are caught in fair numbers on the offshore banks. Practically all the fish that compose the shore catch are caught within 20 and most of them within 10 miles of land. The larger fish usually keep farther offshore than the small ones, and on the whole live deeper, except when pursuing some particular feed.
Pollock has always been one of the principal fish caught with hook and line, although they are also caught regularly by the line trawlers and in less amount by the otter trawlers on all the offshore fishing grounds, but as a rule the catches brought in thence are insignificant compared with those of the inshore fishery. The majority are caught at George's Bank and off Chatham.
The pollock is an active, wandering fish, living at any level between bottom and surface, often schooling like the mackerel, and sometimes gathering in bodies so large that it is on record that a purse seiner [boat with vertical net] once took 60,000 out of one school at a single set. It is a predaceous fish, feeding chiefly on small fish, and it is the local presence or absence of prey that governs the movements of the larger fish and their schooling.
The chief spawning ground for pollock is at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay. The pollock is a late autumn and early winter spawner, with the 1st of November to the middle of January covering the period of most active production for the Massachusetts Bay region.
