Cod

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

“A subject as mighty and tragic as this deserves an excellent biographer, and in Mark Kurlansky, cod has found one. Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated ... Kurlansky's marvelous fish opus stands as a reminder of what good non-fiction used to be: eloquent, learned, and full of earthy narratives that delight and appall.”

—
Toronto Globe and Mail

 

“In the end the book stands as a kind of elegy, a loving eulogy not only to a fish, but to the people whose lives have been shaped by the habits of the fish, and whose way of life is now at an end.”

—
Newsday

 

“What a prodigious creature is the cod. Kurlansky's approach is intriguing—and deceptively whimsical. This little book is a work of no small consequence.”

—
Business Week

 

“An elegant brief history ... related with vast brio and wit.”

—
Los Angeles Times

 

“In the story of the cod, Mark Kurlansky has found the tragic fable of our age—abundance turned to scarcity through determined shortsightedness. This classic history will stand as an epitaph and a warning.”

—Bill McKibben

 

“This eminently readable book is a new tool for scanning world history.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

 

“In this fascinating story of cod, written in a flowing, poetic prose, the author takes you back to the ancient Basque fisherman and the recipes of the fourteenth-century Taillevent, the eighteenth-century Hannah Glasse, and the nineteenth-century Alexandre Dumas. This exceptional book entertainingly reveals the importance of this wonderful fish in history.”

—Jacques Pepin

 

“One emerges from Mark Kurlansky's little book with a feeling that the codfish not only changed the world during the past one thousand years but seemed to define it.”

—
Ocean Navigator

 

“A readable, credible, and at times incredible tale.”

—
Saveur

 

“One
helluva
fish.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

Mark Kurlansky worked for several years on commercial fishing boats, and subsequently became a journalist, covering beats in Eastern and Western Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America for the
Chicago Tribune
and the
International Herald Tribune.
He has written for magazines including
Harper's, Audubon,
and
The New York Times Magazine,
and contributes a column on food history to
Food & Wine
magazine. In addition to
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World,
he is the author
of A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny, A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry, The Basque History of the World,
and
Salt.
He lives in New York City.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
First published in the United States of America by
Walker Publishing Company, Inc. 1997
Published in Penguin Books 1998

Copyright © Mark Kurlansky, 1997

All rights reserved

The author has made every effort to locate and contact
all the holders of copyright to material produced in this book.

Codfish engraving used as ornament throughout is from the author's collection; “Codfish jig” on page 45 and “Gilded cod from Pickman house stairway” on page 90 from Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.; excerpt on page 177 from “The Cod Head,” by William Carlos Williams, from
Collected Poems:
1909-1939,
Volume I
. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. .; recipes for Bacalao a lo Comunista on page 218 and Kokotchas de Bacalao Verde on page 247 from the book
El Bacalao: The Recipes of PYSBE,
.l, Donostia, Spain; recipe for Salted Cod Croquettes on page 264 reprinted from the book
Talismano Della Felicita,
by Ada Boni. Copyright © 1950 by Crown Publishers, Inc. .; recipe for Sonhos de Bacalhau on page 265 from the book
Foods of the Azores
. Avila, Palo Alto, Calif.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67287-3

1. Codfish—Literary collections. 2. Cod fisheries. 3. Cookery (Codfish).
I. Title.
PN607I.C66K87 1997
333.95'6633—dc21 97-12165

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONS FOR MANKIND—THE PROBLEM WHICH UNDERLIES ALL OTHERS, AND IS MORE DEEPLY INTERESTING THAN ANY OTHER—IS THE ASCER- TAINMENT OF THE PLACE WHICH MAN OCCUPIES IN NATURE AND OF HIS RELATIONS TO THE UNIVERSE OF THINGS.

 

—H. Thomas Henry Huxley,
Man's Place in Nature

 

 

 

 

SO THE FIRST BIOLOGICAL LESSON OF HISTORY IS THAT LIFE IS COMPETITION. COMPETITION IS NOT ONLY THE LIFE OF TRADE, IT IS THE TRADE OF LIFE—PEACEFUL WHEN FOOD ABOUNDS, VIOLENT WHEN THE MOUTHS OUTRUN THE FOOD. ANIMALS EAT ONE ANOTHER WITHOUT QUALM; CIVILIZED MEN CONSUME ONE ANOTHER BY DUE PROCESS OF LAW.“

 

—Will and Ariel Durant,
The Lessons of History

THE HERRING ARE NOT IN THE TIDES AS THEY WERE OF OLD;
MY SORROW FOR MANY A CREAK GAVE THE CREEL IN THE CART
THAT CARRIED THE TAKE TO SLIGO TOWN TO BE SOLD,
WHEN I WAS A BOY WITH NEVER A CRACK IN MY HEART.

—William Butler Yeats, “The Meditation of the Old Fisherman”

 

T
hese are the fishermen who stand sentry over the cod stocks off the headlands of North America, the fishermen who went to sea but forgot their pencil.

Sam Lee, dressed in black rubber boots and a red flotation jacket made even brighter by its newness, drives his late-model pickup truck through the last murk of night, down to the wharves that stretch out to where the water is deep enough for a shallow fishing skiff. The warehouses, meeting halls, and tackle shops are all built out above the shallow water on stilts. This has freed up the narrow strip of flat land where the steep little mountains stop just before the water's edge. The level area had once been needed to spread out thousands of splayed and salted cod for drying in the open air.

The salting had stopped almost thirty years before, but Petty Harbour still looks like a crowded little port, its few commercial buildings crunched in along the water, while houses scatter up onto the beginnings of the slopes.

At the wharves, Sam meets up with Leonard Stack and Bernard Chafe carrying flashlights and joking about Sam's new jacket, shielding their eyes from its shocking brilliance. Grumbling about fishery politics, about last night's television talk of reopening groundfishing to the public on a limited basis, they climb down into Leonard's thirty-two-foot, open-decked trap skiff.

Asked if he could really float with that jacket, Sam answers, “I don't want to find out!” And that is all they say about the black water a few feet away on either side of them as the boat heads out in the first violet light of early-autumn morning. Cod like the water this time of year because they think it is warm. But forty-five degrees Fahrenheit is a cod's idea of warm, and the gunwales around the edge of a trap skiff are only inches high. This same day, in another community, the bodies of two fishermen who fell overboard are found. This isn't something fishermen talk about.

They head out to sea. Sam, a small, dark-haired man, with a touch of rose on his clean-shaven cheeks, is stuffed into his scarlet flotation jacket. Leonard is in the little pilothouse, while Bernard, in his flame orange overalls, stands with Sam on the open deck looking contemplatively at a flat sea of dark, polished facets. The light is beginning to warm a clear sky. Once the sun is up, the only clouds are cotton candy fog stuck between the rocky, still-green hills of the September coastline.

They find their fishing grounds by land markings. When a brown rock is aligned over the church steeple, when certain houses first come into view, or when they first sight the white spot on a rock that they call “the Madame” because in their imagination it looks like a skirt and a bonnet, they are ready to drop anchor and begin fishing.

Only today, having forgotten a pencil, they head over to the other boat where the three-man crew is already hauling cod with handlines. After a few jokes about the size of this sorry young catch, someone tosses over a pencil. They are ready to fish.

These men are part of the Sentinel Fishery, now the only legal cod fishery in Newfoundland. In July 1992, the Canadian government closed Newfoundland waters, the Grand Banks, and most of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to groundfishing. Groundfish, of which the most sought after is cod, are those that live in the bottom layer of the ocean's water. By the time the moratorium was announced, the fishermen of Petty Harbour, seeing the rapid decline of their once prolific catch, had been demanding it for years. They had claimed, and it is now acknowledged, that the offshore trawlers were taking nearly every last cod. In the 1980s, government scientists had ignored the cry of inshore fishermen that the cod were disappearing. This deafness proved costly.

Now two Petty Harbour boats are participating in the Sentinel Fishery, a program meant to get scientists and fishermen working together. A few fishermen in each community are sentries, measuring the progress of the cod stock by catching fish and reporting their findings to government scientists. The men on Leonard's boat are tagging and releasing as many fish as they can catch. At the same time, the fishermen on the other boat are supposed to catch exactly 100 fish, open them up to see if they are male or female, and remove a tiny bone from the head, the otolith, which helps the cod keep its balance. The rings of the otolith tell the cod's age.