Cod

by Mark Kurlansky

  Waiting for the next boat, they grumble, as everyone in Gloucester is doing this week, about a large Russian factory ship in the harbor. It is no longer allowed to fish U.S. waters, but it came in to buy from fishermen. For all their complaining, the fishermen always sell to them. One fisherman accuses the ship of flying the red flag higher than that of the United States, even while in port. He insists he has seen this and does not seem to know that Russia doesn’t use a red flag anymore.

  A fifty-foot three-man gillnetter comes in. The captain, Cecil, is almost as wide as he is tall, his blond hair lighter than his weatherbeaten face. One of the three crewmen is his son, a young man with the same build. They have been out following the tuna boats, which throw over chum. The dogfish chase the chum, and they, having set their nets overnight in the tuna grounds, are now coming in with their deck packed with bleeding little sharks. Dogfish pay only thirteen cents a pound, seventeen for the larger ones, and most of this catch is small. As Cecil works the ropes and a huge crate of the slimy catch swings over the pier, someone jokingly shouts, “There it is, fish-and-chips for London.”

  Gloucestermen claim that bluefin tuna had been running well and that all the talk about it being rare was a ploy by sports fishermen. “Environmentalists and sports fishermen. It’s a highbrow thing.” Enough tuna is getting landed so that it serves as the logo for Old Port Seafood. As long as fishermen can catch a fish, they resist the idea that the species is in trouble. But with cod, they all recognize that there is a problem. Except Nicki, who argues, “There’s lots of cod out there. If you used a three-inch net, you would get lots of legal cod. A twenty-inch fish escapes a six-inch net. If they just kept the regulations in place, the fish would come back. If they keep adding restrictions, the fish will be back but the fishermen will be gone.”

  In Gloucester, it is a commonly held belief that the damage from overfishing is only temporary but that the restrictions are doing permanent damage to the community. Soon, it is believed, the cod will be back, and the fishermen will be gone, their boats turned into scrap. And then—and this is the maddeningly unjust part—according to this scenario, the Canadians, their historic competitors, are going to come down and take all their fish.

  Bad blood between Canadian and New England fishermen dates back to the French and Indian War when French fishermen from Cape Breton had menaced New Englanders and Gloucestermen fought with the troops who took the garrisoned French fishing station at Louisbourg. Nova Scotians and Quebecers had refused to side with New England in the Revolution. In 1866, both the British and the Canadians had excluded New Englanders from the Canadian three-mile limit. In 1870, five Gloucester schooners had been seized by Canada, and the Gloucester citizenry had petitioned Congress to cut relations with Canada. The Edward A. Horton, the Gloucester schooner forced into Guysborough, Nova Scotia, and stripped of its sails, is part of Gloucester lore. Six New Englanders broke into a warehouse at night, took the impounded gear, rerigged the schooner, and slipped away on the flood tide.

  Of course, during most of this history, the ancestors of most of the present-day Gloucester fishermen were jigging off of Sicily, along the Greek islands, or off the Azores. But more recently, when Gorton’s had closed its redfish operation in Gloucester, the company had moved it to Canada. And when the 200-mile limits were established, New Englanders had fought to keep Nova Scotians off Georges Bank, while Nova Scotians had fought to keep them off the Grand Banks. This fear of Canadian competition is part of Gloucester culture, the same way fear of Spaniards is somehow in the brick walls of Newlyn.

  It is true that fishing policy is forcing fishermen out. Angela Sanfilippo, a leader in the activist group Fishermen’s Wives of Gloucester, organized a program to retrain fishermen for other jobs. After two years, she has found new jobs for twenty-nine fishermen—as marina workers, truck drivers, mechanics, plus a few jobs in the computer field. But her own husband, John Sanfilippo, told her, “No one is ever going to stop me from fishing.”

  Like many Gloucester fishermen in the late twentieth century, the Sanfilippos are from Sicily, where catches were meager and boats small. John, born in 1945, the ninth child of a fishing family, began in a little dory with his father. They gillnetted, longlined, jigged, purse seined, and survived in the postwar years of poverty. He moved to the United States when he was twenty-two. Angela came in 1963 as a seventeen-year-old. The men in her family also had been fishermen for generations. She had relatives salmon fishing in Alaska, and tuna fishing out of San Diego. Her parents took her to Milwaukee, where cousins were fishing the Great Lakes. But the fish were dying from pollution, and the experience left Angela with a keen sense that polluters were the enemy of fishermen. Her father got a job in a foundry to support the family, but unable to give up fishing, he went out on weekends. Deeply unhappy, the family was about to return to Sicily when friends told them about Gloucester.

  When John came to Gloucester, he abandoned all other forms of fishing for bottom dragging. Groundfish were the prize, though each Sunday, his day off, he fished for bass on the State Pier. Most fishermen cannot stop fishing. Lobstermen will take a rod and reel and try some trolling while waiting for tides. When fishermen of the Portuguese White Fleet had a full hold of cod, and put in at St. John’s for supplies for the return journey, they would come ashore to catch trout in the streams. When Angela was pregnant with their daughter, John became restless and bought bait from a Russian factory ship to go longlining for swordfish with buoys made of chlorine bottles. On August 3, 1975, the night their daughter was born, he caught sixty-five swordfish in the deep water beyond 200 miles known as the Canyons. Once their children were grown, the Sanfilippos finally took a vacation to Bermuda. John went fishing with two poles off the pier of the Princess Hotel. Using french fries for bait, he caught tropical fish that resembled the rockfish in Sicily. He advised the kitchen on how to prepare them.

  They managed to send their son, Dominic, to Tufts, where he was a political science major. But after two years, he returned to Gloucester saying he wanted to be a fisherman. Angela cried. In Newfoundland, Sam Lee fought with his son because he also dropped out of school and wanted to fish.

  “But after a couple of months,” says Angela, “I realized that he is happy. He said he wanted to go to Georges Bank. He couldn’t go before, because it was too far for the small boat with his father. So he crewed on a big dragger and fished the Bank just before it closed. Now he wants to buy a fishing boat. I tell him to keep his money. He will need it for something else. He says, ‘I miss my sunrise and my sunset and the seagulls flying over me.’ ”

  Vito Calomo, a Sicilian-born ex-fisherman who now works for the Fisheries Commission in the Gloucester Community Development Department, says, “You buy out a man whose father and grandfather were fishermen, and you are wiping out a hundred years of knowledge. A fisherman is a special person. He is a captain, a navigator, an engineer, a cutter, a gutter, an expert net mender, a market speculator. And he’s a tourist attraction. People want to come to a town where there are men with cigars in their mouth and boots on their feet mending nets. We are going to lose all that.”

  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.

  A Cook’s Tale

  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

  THE CORRECT WAY TO FLUSH A COD

  “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.

  TWO VIEWS OF STOCKFISH

  [STOCKFISH IS] HARD AS LUMPS OF WOOD, BUT FREE OF BAD FLAVOR, IN FACT, WITHOUT MUCH FLAVOR AT ALL ... THOUGH VERY NICE AS AN APPETIZER, AND AFTER ALL, ANYTHING THAT PERFORMS THAT FUNCTION CANNOT BE ALL THAT BAD.

  —Poggio Bracciolini (celebrated Latin scholar), 1436

  DRIED FISH IS A STAPLE FOOD IN ICELAND. THIS SHOULD BE SHREDDED WITH THE FINGERS AND EATEN WITH BUTTER. IT VARIES IN TOUGHNESS. THE TOUGHER KIND TASTES LIKE TOE-NAILS, AND THE SOFTER KIND LIKE THE SKIN OFF THE SOLES OF ONE’S FEET.

  —W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice,

  Letters from Iceland, 1967

  BEAT IT

  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.

  Item, when it [cod] is taken in the far seas and it is desired to keep it for 10 or 12 years, it is gutted and its head removed and it is dried in the air and sun and in no wise by a fire, or smoked; and when this is done it is called stockfish. And when it hath been kept a long time, and it is desired to eat it, it must be beaten with a wooden hammer for a full hour, then set it to soak in warm water for a full 12 hours or more, then cook and skim it very well like beef.

  —Author unknown,

  Le Mesnagier de Paris, circa 1393

  KILL IT: LUTEFISK

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

  First the beaten stockfish is put in cold water for four or five days, but the water must be changed regularly. Then lye or pure, crumbled ash made of nothing but birch or beech is boiled in water in a pot and then set aside until the ashes fall to the bottom: then cold water is poured out of the pot into another container, where it stands until it is very clear. The fish is put in this clear water where it stays for three days and taken out of it three hours before it is to be washed in cold water and boiled like any other fish and eaten with melted butter and mustard.

  �
�Marta María Stephensen,

  A Simple Cookery Pocket Booklet for Gentlewomen, 1800

  (translated by Hallfredur Örn Eiriksson)

  DIVERSIONARY TACTIC

  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.

  Take a dry stockfish, pound 100 grams on a stone with a hammer, reducing it to a kind of powder. For 100 grams of stockfish, crush 4 cloves of garlic in a mortar. Heat olive oil in a skillet until it smokes and brown 2 pébréta [hot peppers]. When the oil starts to smoke, toss in the mixture of dried stockfish and garlic. When this preparation is lightly browned, spread it on a piece of pain de compagne [country-style bread] and wolf it down.

  —Jacques Médecin, ex-mayor of Nice

  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.”