Cod (24 page)

At that moment, a pickup truck with a lawn-mowing tractor on the back comes down the coastal road, and Calomo shouts at the driver. “That's my brother. He was a captain, and now he's cutting grass. A captain, cutting grass. I saw one washing dishes in a restaurant and one who works as a security guard.”

To Calomo, Sanfilippo, and most of the people in the Gloucester fishing community, their plight is not their fault but the responsibility of government. “What do they do about the Red Sox?” argues Calomo about Boston's perennially losing baseball team. “They don't get rid of the Red Sox. They fire the managers.”

Calomo says, “Canada is going to be American, and we are going to be Canada. Because they are subsidizing out-of-work fishermen, they will have them when the fish come back. They are keeping their fishermen. They are going to fill our market. Who's going to be left to fish here when the fish come back?”

Angela Sanfilippo, who was active in the fight to stop oil exploration on Georges Bank, says, “Who is going to look after the sea if the fishermen are gone?” It is not an unreasonable question. Will it be Unilever, the huge multinational that bought Gorton's? Will Unilever launch an angry protest when a corporation pollutes the sea?

 

Is it really all over? Are these last gatherers of food from the wild to be phased out? Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant? Is Gloucester to become a village of boutiques, labeled “an artist colony,” like Rockport? Will Newlyn one day be only for strolling, like its neighboring towns, or as has already happened to St. Sebastián? Will Gloucester harbor, too, be converted into a yacht basin? Or should it be preserved, as is Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, as a museum to the days of fishing?

Governments understand that there is a social function to having fishermen and having fishing ports. Even while they have programs to reduce the size of their fleets in order to save fish stocks, they are also subsidizing fishing because there is no work available for most ex-fishermen. In the developed world, only Iceland expects fisheries to make a serious contribution to the economy, and even that country is trying to reduce the number of fishermen. A 1989 study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that it cost about $92 billion to operate the global fishing fleet. Revenue, on the other hand, was only $70 billion; much of the difference was made up by subsidies from governments to fishermen and boat builders. According to the FAO, by the early 1990s, the twelve-nation European Union was spending about $580 million in annual fishing subsidies, while Norway alone paid out about $150 million. The Japanese government was estimated to have extended $19 billion in credit to its troubled fishing industry, much of which credit will never be paid back.

Miles from Gloucester harbor, at the hotels along the rocky New England coastline—rocks once valued for drying cod and now loved as a scenic element—tourists eat their breakfasts and plan their day. In the distance, lobster boats and small trawlers glide by, their diesel engines out of hearing range. Many of the tourists are planning to go “whale watching.” They talk of whales as adorable pets, how they flop and dive and make a real snoring noise. On this rugged coastline where fortunes were once made hunting whales, whale watching has become a prosperous business during the tourism months. The skippers of the whale-watching boats are usually out-of-work fishermen.

There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks? Whales are mammals, and mammals do not lay a million eggs. We were forced to give up commercial hunting and to raise domestic mammals for meat, preserving the wild ones as best we could. It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.

ONE MIGHT SAY THAT IT [COD] IS THE ONLY FOOD,
APART FROM BREAD, WHICH, ONCE ONE HAS GOT USED
TO IT, ONE NEVER GETS BORED OF, WITHOUT WHICH ONE
COULD NOT LIVE AND WHICH ONE COULD NEVER
EXCHANGE FOR ANY DELICACY.

—Elena Ivanovna Molokhovets,
A Gift to Young Housewives,
St. Petersburg, 1862

 

 

SIX CENTURIES OF COD RECIPES

“YES, YES, I WILL DESALINATE YOU, YOU
GRANDE MORUE!”

—Émile Zola,
Assommoir,
1877

There is no general agreement on how to resuscitate stockfish or saltfish. No two pieces of cured cod are of the exact same thickness, dryness, or saltiness, and furthermore, different people prefer different tastes, often depending on the type of dish being made. Soaking will generally take more than 24 hours, but for very dry stockfish it can be several days. Most cooks agree that the only way to know when a cured fish is ready for cooking is to break off a piece and taste it. The more it has been dried, the longer it must be soaked. Salted fish needs to have the water in which it is soaking changed periodically so that the fish is not sitting in salt water.

Hannah Glasse in the 1758 edition of her British book wrote that stockfish should be soaked in milk and warm water. Most modern cooks insist on cold water and many believe it is best when soaked in a refrigerator, especially during warm weather. Others have been known to turn to another modern invention, the flush toilet.

Deep inland in France,
La France profonde,
as the French like to say, on the far side of the mountain range called the Massif Central, is the Aveyron. It is a rugged region of high green sheep pastures, deep gorges, and jagged rock outcrop-pings, the most famous of which, in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, provides the natural caves for aging the world's most famous cheese. An isolated area where shepherds still speak a local dialect, the region would get supplies all the way from distant Bordeaux on river barges. Barges would move up the Garonne to the Lot to Rodez and other towns in the Aveyron. The stockfish, bought in Bordeaux and dragged in the river behind the barge for the two-day voyage, would be soft and ready for cooking when it arrived.

In the twentieth century, the Lot became increasingly polluted and unnavigable, but a new invention was well suited to the preparation of stockfish: the flush toilet. In 1947, the president of the Conseil, the governing body of France, asked his valet to flush the toilet once an hour for the next week in preparation for a special dinner he was preparing on Sunday. The dish was stockfish. The toilet was fed by a water tank mounted high up on the wall, the
chasse d‘eau.
A stockfish left in the chasse
d'eau
for two days was soft and ready for cooking. The system was also ideal for salted fish, since the water was easy to change. All of this may be deemed unaesthetic, but, unfortunately, it is now more hygienic than using the Garonne and its tributaries.

Before the toilet and the refrigerator, the tool that seems inevitably tied to stockfish was the hammer. If stockfish is of good quality, it resembles a rough-hewn, soft wood a bit lighter than balsa. The fibers have to somehow be broken down.

Norwegians soften stockfish to almost jelly by putting it in lye.

 

In 1982, British novelist Graham Greene, an elderly resident of Nice, started making seemingly paranoid public accusations about corruption in city hall. It was suggested that the famous author of intrigue was beginning to lose his grasp on reality. But when asked about Greene's allegations in an interview, the mayor, Jacques Médecin, son of another famous Nice mayor, began talking about cooking and offered a recipe for stockfish. In time, the mayor slipped away to South America, where excellent salt cod is available but little in the way of true stockfish.

The following recipe, according to Médecin, who is not always taken at his word, was given to his father by a local fisherman named Barba Chiquin, which in dialect means “uncle who likes a good bottle.” Barba Chiquin would invite children over for this dish.

 

Médecin warned against trying the recipe unless you have a well-stocked wine cellar to deal “with a thirst which will last at least four or five days.”

 

 

Thoreau made these observations on a trip to Cape Cod the same year that Herman Melville's
Moby
Dick would describe Nantucket cows wandering with cod's heads on their feet. Thoreau was right that the heads were not likely to be offered to a cow, but the reason was that people like to eat them.

 

NOT THE EYES: FISHERMAN'S COD-HEAD CHOWDER