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Dale Gieringer
Back in the day, I used to dine on whale steak at Cronin's restaurant in Cambridge. I quite enjoyed it - like a succulent, slightly fatty version of swordfish. I also bought a can of whale blubber at the epicure store near Harvard Square. It tasted like salty grease, but made a nice lamp when burned in the can like sterno. Unfortunately, I forgot to put insulation under the can, so it burned through the finish of the linoleum countertop. Then came the whaling ban. It was another forty years before I tasted whale again, on the Norwegian Hurtigruten ferry. Totally disappointing. Not at all like a steak, but a greasy black slug of sharkbait.
Of course, there are different kinds of whale, as readers of Moby Dick will recall.
"Only the most unprejudiiced of men nowadays partake of cooked whales" wrote Meliville in 1851, but "porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating."
"The whale would by all accounts be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him...but what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish is his exceeding richness."
Especially abhorrent in Melville's view was the practice of eating a whale by the light of its own oil. Rather like stewing a lamb in its mother milk, an abomination condemned in Leviticus.
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(the more the merrier)
