Submarine Steaks

. . . And the soup he took was Elephant Soup, and the fish he took was Whale, . . . And Noah, he often said to his wife as he sat down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes, if it doesn't get into the wine." -- G. K. Chesterton, Wine and Water.

In Littlefork, Minn., a lunchroom last week regaled diners with a new delicacy --beaverburgers (made from beaver). U.S. citizens were eating horse, rabbit and squirrel in quantities worthy of note. And last week the Department of Interior announced that there would soon reappear on U.S. dinner tables, for the first time since World War I, a more substantial addition to the nation's meat supply: whale meat.

Not to be confused with blubber (whale's fat) or fish (the whale is a warm-blooded mammal), whale tenderloin looks and tastes a good deal like beef. Usually used for animal food, for human consumption it can be corned and canned or broiled as fresh steaks. A full whale steak is 15 feet long, weighs five to seven tons; a single whale has as much meat as 125 steers.

Tenderest whale steaks come from young California grey whales ; old whales are tough. But the U.S. is barred by international treaty from catching grey whales.

(The Japanese, not signatories to the treaty, are catching them like mad.) Consequently the whale meat soon to be offered in U.S. butcher shops (price: probably about 35-c- a pound) will be from the tougher but still palatable finbacks.

Of the once great and adventurous U.S. whaling industry, only a single station remains, near Eureka, Calif. But last week it had a new lease on life; with the opening of the whaling season, the station's whalers prowled the Pacific like men with a mission. Said Boss Whaler John R. Griggs, gazing pensively to sea: "There are a hell of a lot of whales out there."

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