“A fish should not smell fishy.”
This insight is nearly universal. I’ve read it since I got interested in cooking in the late 70s.
No, geniuses. A fish should smell 100 percent fishy. NOTHING ELSE.
What they are objecting to, although they don’t know how to say it, is a different smell: fish going bad, spoiled fish, rotting fish, fish just barely turned.
Fish should smell like fish. And the word for that is fish-y.
