Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [12]
The skin is either eaten or cured as leather. Icelanders used to roast it and serve it with butter to children. What is left from the cod, the remaining organs and bones, makes an excellent fertilizer, although until the twentieth century, Icelanders softened the bones in sour milk and ate them too.
The word cod is of unknown origin. For something that began as food for good Catholics on the days they were to abstain from sex, it is not clear why, in several languages, the words for salt cod have come to have sexual connotations. In the English-speaking West Indies, saltfish is the common name for salt cod. In slang, saltfish means “a woman’s genitals,” and while Caribbeans do love their salt cod, it is this other meaning that is responsible for the frequent appearance of the word saltfish in Caribbean songs such as the Mighty Sparrow’s “Saltfish.”
In Middle English, cod meant “a bag or sack,” or by inference, “a scrotum,” which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary defines cod as “any case or husk in which seeds are lodged.” Does this have anything to do with the fish? Most scholars doubt it but offer no other explanation for the origin of the word. Henry David Thoreau conjectured that the fish was named after the husk of seeds because the female held so many millions of eggs.
There are other connections between codfish and pouches. In Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, where the French have fished cod since before Shakespeare’s birth, and where people still use every part of the fish, cod skin is cured into a kind of leather from which pouches are made. The same is done in Iceland. The fish might also be named for the pouch at the back of a net where the cod are trapped. On a modern trawler, this part of the net is still called the cod end.
In Great Britain since the nineteenth century, cod has meant “a joke or prank.” This may be because a codpiece was presumably far larger than the parts it advertised. However, the Danish word for cod, torsk, also has the colloquial meaning “fool.”
The French word for cod, morue, gave the Atlantic cod the second part of its Latin name. But curiously, sometime in the nineteenth century, while cod was becoming a prank in England, morue in France came to mean “a prostitute.” Historic dictionaries of the French language do not offer an explanation for this, other than that it probably started with the vendors in Paris’s Les Halles market who were given to such anthropomorphisms, especially with fish. Pimps were mackerel, which is an oily and predatory fish. By the nineteenth century, nothing so clearly represented unbridled commercialism as the salt cod. A morue is something degraded by commerce. “Yes, yes, I will desalinate you, you grande morue!” a character declares in Émile Zola’s 1877 novel, Assommoir. And when Louis Ferdinand Céline wrote that the stars are “tout morue,” it was not that they were made of salt cod but that the universe was cheapened and perverse.
In modern French, a fresh cod is called a cabillaud, which comes from the Dutch kabeljauw. The French adopted a foreign word for the fresh fish, which did not greatly interest them, but reserved a French word, morue, for salt cod, which they loved. Morue is an older word than the word cabillaud. In Quebec, where the French language has barely changed since the eighteenth century, the word cabillaud is unknown. Quebecers speak of fresh or salted morue.
To the Spanish, Italians, and Portuguese, fresh cod does not even exist, and there is really no word for it. It has to be called a “fresh salt cod.” Salt cod is baccalà in Italian and bacalhau in Portuguese, both of which may come from the Spanish word bacalao. Typical of Iberia, both the Basques and Catalans claim the word comes from their own languages, and the rest of Spain disagrees. Catalans have a myth that cod was the proud king