Turbot's left-eyed disk sells as white table luxury
Scophthalmus maximus is a large left-eyed flatfish of Northeast Atlantic, Baltic, and Mediterranean shores—an important food species with bright white flesh that stays pale when cooked. Farmed from Spain to China and caught by trawl, it yields four fillets with meatier topsides.
Scophthalmus maximus, named by Linnaeus in 1758, is a bottom-dwelling flatfish of the family Scophthalmidae. It lives in salt and brackish water across the Northeast Atlantic, the Baltic and the Mediterranean, usually near shore over sandy shallows. Both eyes sit on the left side of an asymmetric, disc-shaped body that has been recorded at up to a metre long and 25 kg.
The name is a small tangle. Black Sea fish were once counted in the same species but are now usually split off as the kalkan, S. maeoticus. No true turbot lives in the Northwest Atlantic: the "turbot" at the heart of the Turbot War between Canada and Spain was actually the Greenland halibut. The English word comes from Old French tourbout, possibly from Latin turbo, a spinning top, or from Old Swedish törnbut, "thorn flatfish," either way a nod to its outline.
Its reputation at table is ancient. The Roman satirist Juvenal, writing in the late first and early second centuries AD, built a poem called "The Emperor's Fish" around one, implying it was already a luxury in imperial Rome. Today cooks value its delicate taste under local names such as brat, breet and britt. The flesh is bright white and stays white after cooking, and like other flatfish it gives four fillets, the upper ones thicker, suited to baking, poaching, steaming or frying.
Supply comes from trawlers and, increasingly, from farms. Farms in Norway, Spain, France and Portugal raise it, as do growers in Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, and the species has been carried well beyond its native seas to farms in Canada, Chile and China.
Source: Turbot
