CQtJPOSITION OF COOKED FISH DISHES 



Proximate Analysis of Dishes Containing Fish and Shellfish 



By Charles Fo Lee, Chemical Engineer 

 Fishery Technological Laboratory, Branch of Commercial Fisheries 



Recently there has been a growing demand by physicians, dietitians, 

 nutritionists, and others for information on the composition of foods. The 

 tables in this report are a contribution towards supplying this need, par- 

 ticularly with respect to cooked or prepared fish and shellfish dishes. 

 Rose G« Kerr, Jean Burtis, Dorothy M, Robey, and Nancy L. Shipley, home 

 economists. Fish and Wildlife Service test kitchen at College Park, prepared 

 the recipes, gathered data on size of serving portions, and selected many of 

 the samples to be analysed, 



REVIEW OF LITEPJ^TURE 



The first extensive study of the proximate composition of foods vcas made 

 by Atwater and associates (1888, 1899, and 1906) of the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, A study of the tables on composition of foods in several 

 books (Leach et al. 1920; Sherman 1924; Winton et ^, 1937) still in use 

 reveals that there have been revisions and additions to these data in the 

 intervening years. However, much of the data on composition of fish has come 

 down, through frequent repetition in various reports, from the original 

 investigations that Atwater made before 1890, These reports contained data 

 on the raw flesh of 64 species of fish including 11 types of shellfish, and 

 in this respect are still the most comprehensive studies on the composition 

 of fish. 



The most recent release of the series of publications by the United 

 States Department of Agriculture on the composition of foods is Handbook No, 8 

 by Watt and collaborators (1950). This publication lists data from many 

 sources on proximate composition and on the content of calcium, phosphorus, 

 iron, and some of the vitamins for 751 foods of all kinds, raw, processed, and 

 prepared. In these lists, fish are represented by 48 analyses including 28 

 species. Twenty of these analyses are of raw fish, 20 are of processed fish, 

 and 8 are of cooked fish. Of these last 2 groups, 2 are canned clam chowders 

 and 2 are oyster stews. 



A similar British publication by McCance and Widdowson (1947) contains 

 90 analyses of fish including 50 species among 609 listings for foods of all 

 types. Although the data are based on experimental work in England, some of 

 the material is useful in the United States, The information on the com- 

 position of fish, however, demonstrates the difficulty of utilizing the results 

 of foreign investigations in this field; of the 50 species included in the 

 table, 28 are fish (like skate, dogfish, monkfish, John dory, and gurnards) 

 that are seldom used commercially in this country, though found here; or they 

 are species (like torsk, megrim, pollan, and witch) that are not found at all 

 in domestic markets, India, Spain, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries have 

 also been active recently in the field of fishery research, but it is to be 



