Seafood (1835)

[Towse]

Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>
>    "Seafood" is an important American food term of surprisingly recent vintage.
>    OED and Merriam-Webster have 1836, from KNICKERBOCKER magazine.  The
> American Periodical Series online has that as its earliest "seafood."
>    This is from Literature Online.  OK, it's only a year earlier!
> I apologize!  This one's no charge!
>
> Cooper, James Fenimore, 1789-1851: The Monikins Volume 2 (1835)
> The Monikins Volume 2
> Main text
> CHAPTER XII.
> (...)
> Then he
> had sent the ship round to a distant roadstead, in
> order that there might be no more post-captains
> and rear-admirals among the people; and here had
> he been as much as four days on nothing but nuts.
> Nuts might do for the philosophy of a monkey, but
> he found, on trial, that it played the devil with the
> philosophy of a man. Things were bad enough as
> they were. He pined for a little pork---he cared
> not who knew it; it might not be very sentimental,
> he knew, but it was capital sea-food; his natur'  (THIS LINE--ed.)
> was pretty much pork; he believed most men had,
> in some way or other, more or less pork in their
> [Page 188]
> human natur's; nuts might do for monikin natur',
> but human natur' loved meat;

Doesn't this use imply that pork is the capital food for someone
at sea? I always think of "seafood" as being food from the sea:
fish, crab, lobster and the ilk. Not pork.

Sal
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