Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [34]
North American cod fisheries were hurt, probably far more than either Adams would have wanted to admit, by the abolition of slavery in 1834 in the British West Indies, 1848 in the French Antilles, and 1849 in. the Dutch Antilles.
After centuries of bloody slave rebellions, Europe found in the homegrown sugar beet a safer alternative to sugar colonies. Caribbeans continued to eat salt cod and to fashion drums from the barrels. In fact, now that cod no longer comes in barrels, the barrels are still made for musicians. But once the huge plantation economies ended, these little islands became very small markets.
After two centuries of dumping on the Caribbean slave market, there was little quality control in North American salt cod. This was how Thoreau found the Provincetown fishery in 1851:
The cod in this fish-house, just out of the pickle, lay packed several feet deep, and three or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching them on to the barrows with an instrument which has a single iron point. One young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeatedly. Well, sir, thought I, when that older man sees you he will speak to you. But presently I saw the older man do the same thing.
The Mediterranean markets had constant complaints about the quality of Newfoundland cured cod. In 1895, a shipment of Labrador and Newfoundland salt cod was sent to Bilbao; the Basques, saying, “It was not liked here,” shipped it on to southern Spain. In the late twentieth century, right up to the 1992 moratorium, the Canadian government was still trying to convince Newfoundland fishermen not to spear the cod in the way Thoreau had described, because it damaged the fish.
RIPPING, CUTTING, AND SPLITTING
The throat of the fish should be cut as near the gills as possible. The skin between the napes (known as liver strings) should be cut on both sides to prevent tearing when opening fish for gutting. They should be ripped close by the vent on left side, all guts and liver carefully removed, and heads cut off instead of breaking off.
A BADLY SPLIT COD FISH
The wrong way to split a cod, from Notes on Processing Pickled and Smoked Fish by A. W. Fralick, senior field inspector, Maritimes Region, Canada. (Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia)
From the Middle Ages to the present, the most demanding cod market has always been the Mediterranean. These countries experienced a huge population growth in the nineteenth century: Spain’s population almost doubled, and Portugal’s more than doubled. Many ports grew into large urban centers, including Bilbao, Porto, Lisbon, Genoa, and Naples. Barcelona in 1900 had a population of almost one million people—most of them passionate bacalao consumers.
But North Americans did not succeed in this market. Though Newfoundland, Labrador, and Nova Scotia remained almost entirely dependent on fishing, there was little quality and they largely sold to Boston or the Caribbean. The one North American exception was the Gaspé, where a quality Gaspé cure was sold to the Mediterranean. Some 900 years after the Basques won the competitive edge over the Scandinavians by salting rather than just air-drying fish, the Scandinavians became competitive by perfecting salting. Norway and Denmark, which controlled Iceland and the Faroe Islands, moved aggressively into the top-quality Mediterranean markets and have remained.
Even today, with goods and people moving more freely than ever before, most salt cod eaters are attached to the traditional cure of their region. Modern Montreal is a city of both Caribbean and Mediterranean immigrants. At the Jean Talon market in the north of the city, stores feature badly split, small dried salt cods from Nova Scotia and huge, well-prepared salt cod from the Gaspé. The Caribbeans consistently buy the Nova Scotian,