Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [26]
Fill the pot with water to cover the ingredients. Put over a good fire. Let the chowder boil twenty-five minutes. When this is done have a quart of boiling milk ready, and ten hard crackers split and dipped in cold water. Add milk and crackers. Let the whole boil five minutes. The chowder is then ready to be first-rate if you have followed the directions. An onion may be added if you like the flavor.
This chowder is suitable for a large fishing party.
—Daniel Webster,
from The New England Yankee Cookbook,
edited by Imogene Wolcott, 1939
There are a number of other chowder recipes attributed to Daniel Webster. In his memoirs, General S. P. Lyman quotes Webster concluding one recipe: “Such a dish, smoked hot, placed before you, after a long morning spent in exhilarating sport, will make you no longer envy the gods.”
Also see pages 252-56.
5: Certain Inalienable Rights
PRAY SIR, WHAT IN THE WORLD IS EQUAL TO IT? PASS BY
THE OTHER PARTS, AND LOOK AT THE MANNER IN WHICH
THE PEOPLE OF NEW ENGLAND HAVE OF LATE CARRIED
ON THEIR FISHERIES. WHILST WE FOLLOW THEM AMONG
THE TUMBLING MOUNTAINS OF ICE AND BEHOLD THEM
PENETRATING INTO THE DEEPEST RECESSES OF HUDSON’S
BAY AND DAVIS STRAITS, WHILST WE ARE LOOKING FOR
THEM BENEATH THE ARCTIC CIRCLE, WE HEAR THAT
THEY HAVE PIERCED INTO THE OPPOSITE REGION OF
POLAR COLD ... No SEA BUT WHAT IS VEXED BY THEIR
FISHERIES, NO CLIMATE THAT IS NOT WITNESS TO THEIR
TOIL. NEITHER THE PERSEVERANCE OF HOLLAND, NOR
THE ACTIVITY OF FRANCE NOR THE DEXTEROUS AND
FIRM SAGACITY OF ENGLISH ENTERPRISE, EVER CARRIED
THIS MOST PERILOUS MODE OF HEARTY INDUSTRY TO THE
EXTENT TO WHICH IT HAS BEEN PUSHED BY THIS RECENT
PEOPLE.
—Edmund Burke, British House of Commons, March 1775
By the eighteenth century, cod had lifted New England from a distant colony of starving settlers to an international commercial power. Massachusetts had elevated cod from commodity to fetish. The members of the “codfish aristocracy,” those who traced their family fortunes to the seventeenth-century cod fisheries, had openly worshiped the fish as the symbol of their wealth. A codfish appeared on official crests from the seal of the Plymouth Land Company and the 1776 New Hampshire State seal to the emblem of the eighteenth-century Salem Gazette—a shield held by two Indians with a codfish overhead. Many of the first American coins issued from 1776 to 1778 had codfish on them, and a 1755 two-penny tax stamp for the Massachusetts Bay Colony bore a codfish and the words staple of Massachusetts.
When the original codfish aristocrats expressed their wealth by building mansions, they decorated them with codfish. In 1743, shipowner Colonel Benjamin Pickman included in the Salem mansion he was building a staircase decorated with a gilded wooden cod on the side of each tread. The Boston Town Hall also had a gilded cod hanging from the ceiling, but the building burned down, cod and all, in 1747. After the American Revolution, a carved wooden cod was hung in the Old State House, the government building at the head of State Street in Boston, at the urging of John Rowe, who, like many of the Boston revolutionaries, was a merchant. When Massachusetts moved its legislature in 1798, the cod was moved with it. When the legislature moved again in 1895, the cod was ceremoniously lowered by the assistant door-keeper and wrapped in an American flag, placed on a bier, and carried by three representatives in a procession escorted by the sergeant-at-arms. As they entered the new chamber, the members rose and gave a vigorous round of applause.
All of which proves that New Englanders are capable of great silliness.
At the time of this last transfer, three representatives commissioned to study the history of the carving presented a report in which they wrote extensively on the subject of the cod trade—about trading New England salt cod for salt, fruit, and wine in Europe and molasses, spices, and coffee in the West Indies. But the report, like many accounts of the