Cod
Mark Kurlansky
This is as short and succinct a title as you can ask for. The subtitle is A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and it is a complete biography. The Vikings apparently were the first to discover the areas of the North Atlantic where there appeared to be endless schools of cod and they were able to make their long voyages to the North American continent because they learned to preserve the fish by hanging them in the frosty winter air until they had lost four fifths of their weight. This left the fish in a board–like condition and the Vikings had but to break off a piece and chew it like hardtack. Although the Vikings traded some cod with the northern Europeans, it was the Basques who developed trade with southern and central Europe. The Basques had salt, which the Norse did not, and dried, salt cod became a favorite dish all over Europe.
As other countries discovered the cod and the cod fishing grounds, what might be called the “Passenger Pigeon Syndrome” took over. There seemed to be unlimited numbers of cod and after all, a single cod would lay a million eggs, so why should anyone worry? As the catches began to diminish, two things happened: The fishermen began to use more “efficient” methods of fishing, and the countries near the fishing grounds began to increase the limits of their territorial waters. The fishermen went from dories with hand–held lines with single hooks, to multiple hooks, to long lines and nets, to bottom draggers which scooped up everything in their paths and left the sea floor a desert. The nations near the fishing grounds increased their three–mile territorial limit to twelve and then 200 miles. But no one took seriously the notion that the world’s seas were running out of cod until it was too late. Nowadays cod fishing is severely limited in the hope that the cod will come back, but even that is not certain.
Today, in Canada, the government has closed Newfoundland waters, the Grand Banks, and most of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to groundfishing-the most important groundfish being cod. The only legal cod fishery in Newfoundland is the Sentinel Fishery. The Sentinel boats have two jobs-one boat will catch as many cod as they can, tag them, and throw them back. Another boat will catch exactly 100 cod, if they can, open them up to see whether they are male or female and to remove a tiny bone in the head, the otolith, from which the fish’s age can be determined. There is much pressure to open the waters to limited fishing, but the Sentinel fishermen are proving with their scant, underage catches that there are still not enough cod to allow any fishing at all.
The final two sentences in the book are, “It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.”
There are more recipes using cod in this book than you would ever want to use.