The ‘fish missionary’ who changed what we eat, one Alaskan salmon at a time

The ‘fish missionary’ who changed what we eat, one Alaskan salmon at a time

By Rebekah Denn

Source: washingtonpost

10/5/2017

Almost everyone who loves good food owes a debt to Jon Rowley, whether they know it or not.

The interest has accrued over the past 40 years from the gleamingly fresh fish we eat at restaurants or buy in supermarkets, from just-shucked oysters and the simplicity of a foraged salmonberry, from Rowley’s insistence that even good foods had to be coaxed like children into reaching their greatest potential. Most famously, Rowley turned Alaskan Copper River salmon from a lowly cannery catch into a premium signature of spring.

“There is nobody like him,” said Ruth Reichl, former editor in chief of Gourmet magazine. She called Rowley, who died on Wednesday at the age of 74, a pioneer along the lines of Alice Waters. “He really understood that quality is everything in food, and he thought it was important, and he thought we could do it in this country.”
An Alaska-based commercial fisherman turned Seattle-based marketer, Rowley embraced his true role as a tastemaker. He corresponded with Julia Child for decades — her name for him was “the fish missionary” — and they traded research on “fascinating” topics like piscine rigor mortis. When “The Silver Palate Cookbook” co-author Sheila Lukins visited Seattle, Rowley took her on a strawberry-picking trip with his daughter Megan’s fifth-grade class. The shortcake he made the group with his favorite fragile Shuksan berries went into her “U.S.A.” cookbook as the best one ever, a fairly standard reaction to the foods Rowley champions.