Cod (6 page)

Hannah Glasse's recipes show how much has been lost from the craft of British cooking, especially the art of roasting. A century after Glasse, French food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “You may be born to cook, but you must learn to roast.”

Glasse also offered equally elaborate recipes for both boiled and baked cod head.

 

Also see pages
241-44.

IF CODFISH FORSAKE US, WHAT THEN WOULD WE HOLD?
WHAT CARRY TO BERGEN TO BARTER FOR GOLD?

—Peter Daas,
Trumpet of Nordland,
Norway, 1735

 

T
he Basque secret was out. Raimondo di Soncino, Milan's envoy in London, had written a letter to the duke of Milan on December 18, 1497, reporting John Cabot's return on August 6:

From this statement, historians have concluded that John Cabot's men caught cod simply by dropping weighted baskets. There is no evidence that Cabot ever said this, nor is it known how reliable di Soncino's source was. However, subsequent accounts do confirm that the coast of North America was churning with codfish of a size never before seen and in schools of unprecedented density, at least in recorded European history.

When Europeans first arrived, North America had a wealth of game and fish unparalleled in Europe. Flocks of birds, notably the passenger pigeon, which is now extinct, would darken the sky for hours as they passed overhead. In 1649, Adriaen van der Donck, the colonial governor of New Amsterdam, wrote from what is now New York that nearby waters had six-foot lobsters. Even a century after Cabot, Englishmen wrote of catching five-foot codfish off Maine, and there are persistent accounts in Canada of “codfish as big as a man.” In 1838, a 180-pounder was caught on Georges Bank, and in May 1895, a six-foot cod weighing 211 pounds was hauled in on a line off the Massachusetts coast. Cabot's men may well have been able to scoop cod out of the sea in baskets.

Cabot, a skilled and experienced navigator, had moved to Bristol with his wife and son only two years before his 1497 voyage, frustrated by the triumphs of Columbus and dreaming of his own glory. Both Columbus and Cabot had been born in Genoa about the same year, and both had searched the Mediterranean for backers. They probably knew each other. Cabot may have even had to endure the spectacle of some of Columbus's triumphant receptions. He seems to have been in Barcelona in April 1493, when crowds cheered his fellow Genovese formally entering the city. At last, when Cabot returned to England after his North American voyage, he basked in the same kind of reception that Columbus had enjoyed in Spain. In England, Cabot was a sensation, the man of the moment, and fans assailed him on the streets of Bristol and London the way they might today if he were a rock star. But there was little time to luxuriate in what might be only fleeting glory. After all, Columbus was about to embark on his
third
voyage. With his sudden fame, Cabot easily raised funding for a second voyage with five ships. One ship soon returned, and the other four, along with Cabot, were never heard from again. It was the first of many such calamities.

 

The Portuguese were also exploring and charting North America. A 1502 map identifies Newfoundland as “land of the King of Portugal,” and to this day, many Portuguese consider Newfoundland to be a Portuguese “discovery.” Many of the earliest maps of Newfoundland show Portuguese names. Those names have remained, though they are no longer recognizably Portuguese. Cabo de Espera (Cape Hope), the tip of land between St. John's and Petty Harbour, has become Cape Spear, Cabo Raso is now Cape Race, and the Isla dos Baccalhao is Baccalieu Island. In 1500, Gaspar Côrte Real went to Newfoundland and named it Greenland, Terra Verde. He was the youngest son of Joao Vaz Côrte Real, a despotic ruler of the Azores and yet another mariner who some claim went to America before Columbus. In 1501, on his second trip, after sending back fifty-seven Beothuk as sample slaves, Gaspar, like Cabot, vanished with his ship and crew. The following year, his brother Miguel was lost along with his flagship and its crew.

This grim early record did not discourage fishermen. Fishing had opened up in Newfoundland with the enthusiasm of a gold rush. By 1508, 10 percent of the fish sold in the Portuguese ports of Douro and Minho was Newfoundland salt cod. In France, the Bretons and Normans had an advantage because the profitable markets of the day were nearby Rouen and Paris. By 1510, salt cod was a staple in Normandy's busy Rouen market. By midcentury, 60 percent of all fish eaten in Europe was cod, and this percentage would remain stable for the next two centuries.

The sixteenth-century Newfoundland cod trade was changing markets and building ports. La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast had been a second-string harbor because it was not on a river, a critical flaw since goods were moved on rivers. All La Rochelle had, in addition to a well-protected harbor, was a determined Protestant merchant class that saw the commercial opportunity in Newfoundland cod. Yet La Rochelle became the premier Newfoundland fishing port of Europe. Of the 128 fishing expeditions to Newfoundland between Cabot's first voyage and 1550, more than half were from La Rochelle.

The French dominated these years, originating 93 of those 128 fishing expeditions to Newfoundland. The rest were divided between the English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Figures on the Basques, as is the Basque fate, are buried in French and Spanish statistics, but the French Basque ports of Bayonne and St.-Jean-de-Luz were important in the first half of the century.

Even though Cabot had claimed North America for England, British fishermen had not immediately joined the cod rush because catches were good in Iceland. It was cod that had first lured Englishmen from the safety of their coastline in pre-Roman times. By the early fifteenth century, two- and three-masted ketches with rudders were going to Iceland and the Faroes. Not only were these some of the best fishing vessels of the day, but not until the twentieth century would Icelanders have vessels of an equal quality for fishing their own waters.

But the conflict between England and the Germans of the Hanseatic League over rights to Icelandic cod grew steadily worse. In 1532, an Englishman, John the Broad, was murdered in the Icelandic fishing station of Grindavik. Though Britain's Icelandic Cod Wars are thought of as a twentieth-century phenomenon, the first one was set off by this Grindavik killing and was fought not against Iceland, which was a colonized and docile nation by then, but against the Hanseatic League, which had developed its own navy. Uncharacteristic of the British, after a brief fight they simply withdrew from the Icelandic fishery. As di Soncino had predicted, Britain didn't need Iceland anymore.

Detail showing Cod War of 1532 off of Grindavík from Olaus Magnus's
Carta Marina,
1539. (Uppsala University Library, Uppsala)

 

With the opening up of Newfoundland, the British West country began developing major fishing ports. In the days of slow sailing, a westward location was a tremendous advantage because it reduced the length of a voyage. Except Ireland, which was too impoverished to develop a distant water fleet, the ports that remained important to the Newfoundland fishery into the mid-twentieth century—St.-Malo on the Brittany peninsula, Vigo on the northwest tip of Spain, the Portuguese ports—were those in the European regions closest to Newfoundland.

The Spanish Basque city of Bilbao, with its ironworks providing the anchors and other metal fittings for Europe's ships, was one of the ports that grew with the boom in shipbuilding created by the cod trade. According to historian Samuel Eliot Morison, at no time in history, not even during World War II, has there ever been such a demand for replacement of sunken ships as between 1530 and 1600. European ambition was simply too far ahead of technology, and until better ships and better navigation were developed, shipwrecks and disappearances were a regular part of this new adventure.

In this rapidly expanding commercial world, the British had one great disadvantage over the French, Spanish, and Portuguese: They had only a modest supply of salt. Most northern countries lacked salt and simply produced winter fish that was dried without salting. It was called stockfish, from the Dutch word
stok,
meaning “pole,” because the fish were tied in pairs by the tail and hung over poles to dry, as is still done out on the lava fields of Iceland every winter.

But the English wanted to produce a year-round supply of cod for a growing market, and since neither the North Sea nor Iceland was cold enough for drying fish in the summer, they became dependent on salting. Some fish were simply sold salted and undried, which became known as “green” not because of the color but because it was considered a more natural state than dried fish. But in an attempt to conserve their limited salt, the British invented a product that was to be favored in Mediterranean and Caribbean markets for centuries: a lightly salted dried cod. The Norwegians called it
terranova fisk,
Newfoundland fish, but later used the name
klipfisk,
rockfish, because it was dried on rocky coasts.

As green and salted-and-dried fish became available, they were preferred to the unsalted stockfish and brought substantially higher prices. The British experimented with new products such as a summer-cured dried cod from the Grand Banks known as Habardine or Poor John. In Shakespeare's
The Tempest,
Trinculo says of Caliban, whom he finds on the beach, “He smells like a fish—a very ancient and fish-like smell—a kind of, not of the newest, poor john.”

Winter cures were known to be superior. Other variations were developed. Some fish was salted directly, and some was pickled in brine in barrels. Some of the pickled and some of the green were later dried to give them more durability. There was not only a wide choice of products in cured Newfoundland cod but also, no doubt, a great range of quality. “As to their Quality, Many of them Stink, for'tis a certain Maxim, that if Fish or Flesh be not well cured and salted first, they cannot be recovered,” John Collins, an accountant to the Royal Fishery, wrote in
Salt and Fisheries.

It is not by chance that a Royal Fishery accountant was publishing a book on salt in 1682. The British fisheries had by then been wrestling with the salt problem for centuries. Collins pointed out that brackish water around England could be boiled, which yielded more salt than did evaporating seawater. He discussed the relative quality of salt and offered this recipe for one of the better English salts.

Wich is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “a place that has salt,” and all the English towns whose names end in wich were at one time salt producers. But they could never produce enough for the Newfoundland cod fishery.