Leave it to the English to add more confusion to an already confusing language. Our language is the only one that uses the word “dolphinfish” for the fish Coryphaena hippurus. This has led to a belief by some that by eating mahimahi, they are committing  “Flipper-cide.”

I wasn’t going to bring up my fabulous trip to the Caymans again, but I was just talking to my girlfriend Fran, my companion on my June trip, and I remembered that I still needed to prove to her that dolphinfish is not the same as dolphin. It is not Flipper! Flipper is a mammal, from the family Delphinidae which is the same family that the Orca belongs. The word “dolphin” is derived from this Greek word. The Dolphinfish is a large, beautiful blue, green and gold coloured fish, common in large numbers in all tropical and subtropical waters. The Hawaiians call this fish Mahi-mahi, which means “strong-strong.” This is not a reference to the flavour or smell of this sweet and delicate tasting fish, but to the energetic acrobatics it performs when caught on a line. This makes the fish a favourite of sports fishermen who love a good contest. (Sorry all of you non-fishing types.) In other languages, the beautiful gold colour of the fish is reflected in the name. The Germans call the fish Goldmakrele and in Spanish the name is Dorado. Anyone who has read Life of Pi will recognize the name of this fish. The dolphinfish has habits similar to the dolphin and it is perhaps because of this that early English sailors gave it its English name. It could just as easily have been named goldfish, but then we would worry that we were eating the family pet!

Mahi-mahi is on every menu in the Caymans. I thought that Fran must not like fish; I hadn’t seen her for 30 years, after all. Here she was in a tropical paradise and not ordering the daily catch which was usually mahi-mahi. After a few days, she told me in a quiet aside that she was surprised to see me ordering the daily catch because she had heard that it was dolphin. She truly believed that the restaurant was trying to feed me Flipper. I was pretty confident that mahi-mahi was not dolphin, although I began to get a niggling feeling that maybe Fran was right; she seemed so sure of herself. I can’t believe that I was actually starting to accept the possibility that they would serve jerk-seasoned Flipper burgers. I must have had too many Red Stripe!

Even after returning to Calgary and researching the answer, I still had to ask my Cayman food expert, Pam. She explained that in the Caymans they call the fish simply “dolphin.” The mammalian dolphin is generally called “porpoise” and there isn’t any confusion. I found that most of the restaurants we visited avoided using the “D” word on their menus and called the fish mahi-mahi. In the Cayman and Caribbean cookbooks I own, the fish is called just “Dolphin,” or sometimes “Cayman Dolphin.” Obviously it must be for the benefit of skittish tourists that the restaurants use a more diplomatic term.