Fishify

Ben[volio]. Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo. Mer[cutio]. Without his Roe, like a dryed Hering. O fleſh, fleſh, how art thou fiſhified?

By ſtrange kitchen alchymy, ev'ry diſh Seem'd tranſmuted for Epicure Mammon: There was fiſhified fleſh, and fleſhified fiſh; A calfs-head ſeem'd a fine jole of ſalmon.

Ye ghosts and hobgoblins, and horrible shapes, Ye lions, and wolves, and ye griffins and apes, Ye strange jumbled figures from river or den, Ye fire-born monsters, and fishified men, […]

The cliffs are at most places perpendicular, or very nearly so; but every now and then there occurs a little valley, or a ledge of rock less abrupt than the rest, and there you may be sure of finding a small village, or at all events a house or two, and sometimes a tolerably respectable sized hamlet, looking down on its diminutive "marina," or fishing beach, with a cluster of fishified huts, and still more fishified inhabitants, clinging like cockles to the faces and edges of the rock.

The figure of this asterism [Cetus], a veritable monstrum marinum, with its long legs, ears, proboscis, missile tongue, and carnivorous jaws, ought rather to have retained the name Ὀρφὸς, Pistrix, as given by [Gaius Julius] Hyginus, than Κῆτος, Cetus, whose un-whale-like appendages did not escape the lash of [Samuel] Butler: […] Stanislaus Lubienietzki, in his Theatrum Cometicum, 1667, attempted to lop off some of these redundancies; but in fishifying the animal he has given him so capacious a mouth and throat, that a Munchausen's ship might well have sailed in. Indeed, the distinctions of a whale seem to have been overlooked by all the celestial delineators.

No fish in today's market, on restaurant menus, or on the cook's stove more personifies—or fishifies—a "You've come a long way, baby" story. There simply wasn't any fresh tuna to be had in American markets a generation or so ago. It was always canned and was presented only for eating mixed cold in tuna salad or hot in tuna casserole. Now it gleams fresh on ice in fish displays, ready to take home and sear as a centerpiece, singed and tossed in salads, thinly sliced or minced raw for sushi and tartars.

[…] I have found a cure for his lunatic excellency. Water expelleth fire—marry, when he talks of being an archbishop, souse him, good Tio,—fishify him straight,—may be his madness is a dog madness which flieth from the fountain.

For although unable to recognise in water an universal and infallible panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to, we can yet bear a large testimony in its favour, and send it out to service with the highest character. It is our deliberate and mature conviction that the inhabitants of the Cumbraes and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland may, to their own infinite advantage, fishify their flesh a great deal more than they do at present.