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George Dennis’s fish-curing establishment, circa 1900, east Gloucester. (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts)

In New England, just as the West Indies market declined, the domestic market grew. Salt cod became a staple of the Union Army, and Gloucester profited from the Civil War. But the war had also industrialized northern economies, and New England, a key player in the American industrial revolution, became much less dependent on its fisheries. The old merchant families moved their money into industry. The term codfish aristocracy was now used by an emerging working class to remind the establishment that they had gotten rich in lowly trade and therefore, for all their airs, were simply nouveau riche.

Their image as Revolutionary leaders faded, and, for all their aristocratic trappings, they were simply remembered as haughty people who had once made a lot of money from fish. In 1874, a Latin American revolutionary, Francisco de Miranda, visited Boston and after going to the Massachusetts State House, reported that the cod hanging there was “of natural size, made of wood, and in bad taste.” Worse yet, in the 1930s, Boston’s Irish-American mayor, James Michael Curley, a feisty populist who took on the Boston establishment, objected to calling them codfish aristocracy. He said the term was “an insult to fish.”

A LINGERING MEMORY

In the American South, slaves modified African cooking for white people. After the Civil War, this process continued as many former slaves found jobs cooking for corporations or the railroad. “I was born in Murray County, Tennessee, in 1857, a slave. I was given the name of my master, D. J. Estes, who owned my mother’s family, consisting of seven boys and two girls. I being the youngest of the family.” So begins the self-published book of Rufus Estes, “formerly of the Pullman Company private car service and present chef of the subsidiary companies of the United States Steel Corporations in Chicago.” Given the flaking technique in his recipe, the date, and place, the “codfish” is probably salt cod.

STEWED CODFISH

Take a piece of boiled cod, remove the skin and bones and pick into flakes. Put these in a stew pan with a little butter, salt and pepper, minced parsley and juice of a lemon. Put on the fire and when the contents of the pan are quite hot the fish is ready to serve.

—Rufus Estes,

Good Things to Eat, 1911

part two

Limits

COD—A SPECIES OF FISH TOO WELL KNOWN TO REQUIRE ANY DESCRIPTION. IT IS AMAZINGLY PROLIFIC. LEEWEN-HOEK COUNTED 9,384,000 EGGS IN A COD-FISH OF A MIDDLING SIZE—A NUMBER THAT WILL BAFFLE ALL THE EFFORTS OF MAN TO EXTERMINATE.

—J. Smith Homans and J. Smith Homans, Jr., editors,

Cyclopedia of Commerce and Commercial Navigation,

New York, 1858

7: A Few New Ideas Versus Nine Million Eggs

HARVEY COULD SEE THE GLIMMERING COD BELOW,

SWIMMING SLOWLY IN DROVES, BITING AS STEADILY AS

THEY SWAM. BANK LAW STRICTLY FORBIDS MORE THAN

ONE HOOK ON ONE LINE WHEN THE DORIES ARE ON THE

VIRGIN OR THE EASTERN SHOALS; BUT SO CLOSE LAY THE

BOATS THAT EVEN SINGLE HOOKS SNARLED, AND HARVEY

FOUND HIMSELF IN HOT ARGUMENT WITH A GENTLE,

HAIRY NEWFOUNDLANDER ON ONE SIDE AND A HOWLING

PORTUGUESE ON THE OTHER.

—Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous, 1896

The banks are treacherous. Depths as great as eighty fathoms are found there, but also areas of fifteen or twenty fathoms and less. Occasionally, in stormy weather, rocks break the surface. Ice floes split off of Greenland and the Arctic and drift south. In 1995, a large one, ironically shaped very much like a great fish with a towering dorsal fin, drifted to the mouth of St. John’s harbor. Even against the high cliffs of that well-sheltered port, it was huge—out of scale with anything around it. At sea, it is difficult to perceive the scale of these drifting ice mountains until they are suddenly off the bow, blocking everything else from sight.

Then there is the cold. For all these centuries, men have gone out in the North Atlantic