Blue Fish, or Parakeet

Parakeet is a nickname, not a species. In Jamaican usage it points at the bright reef fish of the parrotfish family, named for their colour and their beak. On a New Jersey menu the word often lands on blue fish instead.

Same word, different fish, and both of them oily.

What do Jamaicans mean by parakeet fish?

Parrotfish, most of the time. They graze coral, they come in greens and blues, and along the Jamaican coast they have been a common catch for as long as anybody has been catching things there.

Parrotfish carry a mild, faintly sweet flesh that takes seasoning without arguing back, which is part of why they stayed on the table instead of becoming a curiosity.

The name drifts by parish and by market. Fishermen name fish for what they look like, and once a nickname sticks it outlives whatever taxonomy would prefer.

Nobody in a Caribbean market is going to correct you with a Latin name. The fish is what it is called where it is sold.

Worth holding onto that before you argue with a menu board.

Is parakeet the same fish as New Jersey blue fish?

Not biologically. Blue fish is an Atlantic predator, migratory, caught heavily off the New Jersey coast in the warm months, and completely unrelated to a reef grazer.

What they share is fat and force. Both carry a lot of oil in the flesh, both have a pronounced flavour, and both get treated the same way once they reach a Caribbean kitchen: seasoned hard, fried or steamed whole, hit with pepper and vinegar.

So the name transfers on function rather than family. A cook who knows what parakeet does in a pan sees blue fish and recognises the same job.

Diners have posted about ordering blue fish at O Cook Shop, written down on the plate as parakeet. That is the version you would run into in East Orange.

The whole snapper end of a menu behaves differently and deserves its own read. Look at whole snapper sitting on seasoned rice.

Why does oily fish take hard seasoning better?

Because nearly everything sharp in Caribbean seasoning is fat-soluble.

Capsaicin dissolves in oil and not in water. So does eugenol from pimento, and thymol from thyme. Put those on a lean fish and they sit on the surface; put them on a fatty one and they spread through the flesh and stay there.

Fat also buffers. A hard pepper hit on lean white fish arrives all at once and leaves fast. On oily fish it arrives slower, sits longer and finishes softer.

Then there is the cooking itself. Fat keeps flesh from seizing under high heat, which is why oily fish forgives a hot pan and a fried treatment where lean fish goes stringy.

Acid closes the loop. Vinegar and lime cut the oil and stop it reading as heavy, which is precisely what the escovitch method was built to do. See vinegar, pepper and onion poured over fish.

Frying is not the only route. Steaming a whole oily fish with okra, thyme and pimento, then eating it with hard crackers, is a much older Jamaican treatment and it goes lighter on the same ingredients.

Is oily fish too fishy to order?

That word does a lot of unearned work.

The smell people call fishy is mostly trimethylamine, which forms as fish sits, plus the oxidation of the very fats that make oily fish worth eating. Both are functions of handling and time, not species.

Fresh oily fish smells of the sea and almost nothing else. Old oily fish announces itself from across a room, which is why oily fish takes the reputational hit and lean fish gets away with worse.

The Caribbean answer to all of this predates refrigeration and still works. Lime rinse, salt, vinegar in the pickle, pepper on top. Every one of those steps targets amines and oxidised oil directly.

Season matters too. Blue fish runs off this coast in the warmer months, and a fish caught close to where it is sold has less time to develop the smell people are afraid of.

Ask how it was handled if you get the chance. Anybody who cooks fish seriously will tell you, and the answer is more useful than the species name.

Whole fish also protects itself. Skin and bone shield the flesh, the head holds moisture, and the meat closest to the bone stays sweet.

Eat around the spine and check the cheek. That is the best bite on the fish and most people leave it behind.

There is a whole tradition built around this, and you can read where the end-of-week fish habit came from. If you want the wider list, start at everything else that comes out of the water or the fillet option in jerk seasoning on a fatty fillet.

Order it whole. Ask for extra pickle.