Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [30]
Then the British Crown, after letting New Englanders taste free trade for more than a century, decided in 1733 to regulate molasses as a key step toward reasserting its control over commerce. Instead the measure turned out to be one of the first inadvertent steps toward dismantling the British Empire.
WEST INDIA IN THE WEST INDIES
TIME SO HARD YOU CANNOT DENY
THAT EVEN SALTFISH AND RICE WE CAN HARDLY BUY.
—1940s calypso by “the Tiger” (Neville Marcano)
In Puerto Rico there was a piropia, a catcall to attractive women, that went Tanto carne, y yo comiendo bacalao (so much meat, and I’m just eating salt cod). Today meat is cheaper than salt cod, but the expression, like piropias themselves, persists.
Salt cod was a cheap food, mixed with other cheap foods, to make popular dishes. While it is no longer cheap, the recipes remain unchanged. Along with salt cod and roots, the most universal Caribbean salt cod dish is Salt Cod and Rice. Originally, it was a way of stretching the salt cod supply and was often made with the tail or other scraps. Sometimes a stock was prepared from the bones and the rice cooked in that, a dish known in Puerto Rico as Mira Bacalao (Look for the Salt Cod).
SALT COD AND RICE
This is a favourite native dish. The saltfish and rice, about a half a pound of saltfish to a pint of rice, are boiled together with the usual bit of salt pork and a little butter.
—Caroline Sullivan,
The Jamaica Cookery Book, Kingston, 1893
Also see pages 257-61.
6: A Cod War Heard‘Round the World
SALT FISH WERE STACKED ON THE WHARVES, LOOKING
LIKE CORDED WOOD, MAPLE AND YELLOW BIRCH WITH
THE BARK LEFT ON. I MISTOOK THEM FOR THIS AT FIRST,
AND SUCH IN ONE SENSE THEY WERE,—FUEL TO MAIN-
TAIN OUR VITAL FIRES—AN EASTERN WOOD WHICH
GREW ON THE GRAND BANKS.
—Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, 1851
THE ART OF TAXATION CONSISTS OF PLUCKING THE
GOOSE SO AS TO OBTAIN THE MOST FEATHERS WITH
THE LEAST HISSING.
—Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83)
There is romance to revolution. There was to those of France, Russia, Mexico, China, Cuba. But the most romantic of revolutions, such as 1848, seem the greatest failures. The American Revolution was a remarkably successful revolution. It did not fall into chaos and violence, nor did it slide toward dictatorship. It produced no Napoleon and no institutionalized ruling party. It achieved its goals. It was also, as revolutions go, extremely unromantic. The radicals, the real revolutionaries, were middle-class Massachusetts merchants with commercial interests, and their revolution was about the right to make money.
John Adams, the most forceful of this radical Massachusetts element, did not believe in colonialism as an economic system and therefore did not believe that Americans should accept living in colonies. The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard-line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their own economy.
All revolutions are to some degree about money. During France’s revolution, the comte de Mirabeau said, “In the last analysis the people will judge the Revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?” But he was not a radical in that Revolution.
Massachusetts radicals sought an economic, not a social, revolution. They were not thinking of the hungry masses and their salaries. They were thinking of the right of every man to be middle-class, to be an entrepreneur, to conduct commerce and make money. Men of no particular skill, with very little capital, had made fortunes in the cod fishery. That was the system they believed in.
These were not shallow men. Many of them, most