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“Tuna”
Please, “Tuna Fish” is my father. Just call me “Tuna”.
All you crazy foreigners just don’t realize. 'Merica has no regulations, sense, or laws. We call it “Tuna Fish” because just “Tuna” is sawdust and cat liter.
Is there a tuna that is not fish?
Tuna piano?
There is, yes … that’s the main Spanish name for prickly pear.
Up until around 1907, your odds of encountering the fruit by the name “tuna” were about the same as the fish, when the first commercial canneries started to pop up in California… hence, a habit of clarifying between the two that stuck, even though most folks outside of the southwest had never heard of a tuna cactus.
Fascinating. I’ll add a slight addition of info that prickly pears are actually present in the Midwestern and eastern parts of the US. Saw them growing in the wild at the Indiana Dunes national park last year. Very weird to see cacti that far north, but there they were.
Never knew the Spanish name for them!
Thanks for the info :)
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For some reason if I think of a tuna fish sandwich I imagine canned tuna, but if I think tuna sandwich I imagine whole seared tuna.
Ditto
I consider “tuna fish” to be outdated and regional to the South and maybe Midwest US. I grew up hearing it but at some point started wondering why tf we would say that rather than just tuna, so I’ve made a point to just say tuna since then.
Huh, I grew up in the South and never realized it wasn’t normal to say tuna fish sandwich. I guess it doesn’t really make sense, but I still kinda like the ring of it
It is normal, I guess. I grew up with my mother and grandmother saying that. I decided it was silly and I should stop, though.
I order a tuna salad sandwich or a tuna sandwich, but I grew up hearing tuna fish… specifically in reference to the stuff that came in a can.
Both were equally common years ago but over time, “tuna” sans fish has won out… likely because fresh, non canned tuna is very common.
I read an article a while ago that theorized the reason for Americans calling it “tuna fish” was that it rose to prominence as a canned staple good in the 1940s, and many Americans who didn’t live on the coasts had never heard of tuna before. Its light meat, when canned and cooked, was very mild and chicken-y compared with the heavily salted, oily canned fish folks were familiar with, hence both “chicken of the sea” and the precaution of labeling the can with not only tuna, but “fish”.
I think an alternate explanation is probably more likely… the 1919 Oxford English Dictionary describes “Tuna” as an alternative spelling of “tunny”, the old name for the fish (still used in a culinary sense in Britain) … not coincidentally:
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Californians would also have been familiar with the other tuna… tuna fruit, the prickly pear.
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Possessed of both a fruit and a fish of the same name, distinguishing one from the other when canning fish seems reasonable
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The largest canneries of tuna (e.g., the one that ultimately became Chicken of the Sea) were all based in California.
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Tuna. I’m in the midwest. I’ve lived on the west coast. I just assumed “tuna fish” was an east coast thing.
Tuna.
Neither. I never order a tuna sandwich. I sometimes make myself a tuna sandwich. 😂
This :-) and
whenever I ordered something with tuna, it was always ‘tonno’
gourmet
Tooter fish popkin
We call it “fish chunk” sandwich, coz we literally can’t tell if it’s tina or not, we just eat it. That way we aren’t disappointed.
Tuna fish = The animal
Tuna = The meat
It’s like with cows and beef
I drink the milk of the beef fish.
Sounds fine.
I’m in camp “Midwestern American who says tuna fish”. . .but I’m also right there with the person that said they don’t order them and tuna fish sandwiches are something made at home.
For the record, I don’t know why the fish part is specified. It just always was. It’s not like my family called it a “can of tuna fish” growing up or anything. It’s just the sandwiches. Put that tuna between two slices of bread and suddenly the word “fish” gets thrown in there. Maybe it just sounds more fun if you add more syllables? Either that or somebody in the region had to explain that tuna was a kind of fish years and years ago and it just stuck.
We don’t eat tuna
