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Birdseye improved his frozen food technology with his 1946 quick-drying process and went on to many other fields. He founded an electrical company and improved the incandescent lightbulb. In Peru, he developed a process to convert the crushed remains of sugarcane mills into paper. In his sixty-nine-year lifetime, he was awarded 250 patents.

Birdseye’s introduction of freezing came at a critical moment in the cod fisheries. Americans, like the British, were increasingly demanding fresh fish, instead of cured, and the market for salt cod in the United States was steadily declining. In 1910, cured cod represented only 1 percent of fish landings in New England. But even with improved transportation, it was difficult to serve inland markets fresh fish, and so the cod market was dwindling. At the same time, the capacity of fishing fleets was greatly increasing. In 1928, the first diesel-powered trawlers were proving even more efficient than the steam-powered ones.

Because salt cod was still the major industry of Gloucester, the town was in an economic crisis. In 1923, Mayor William MacInnis met with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to discuss declining markets, and Hoover arranged a New York conference to consider ways to promote salt cod consumption in the United States. But with General Foods committed to the Birdseye freezing process, salt cod was fast vanishing from Gloucester. The same year as Hoover’s New York conference, Gloucester’s most established seafood company, Gorton’s, had a crisis that led to the abandoning of the saltfish trade. The Italian government had purchased more than one million dollars’ worth of salt cod from Gorton’s. But while the order was crossing the Atlantic, Benito Mussolini came to power. When the Gorton’s ship arrived, its cargo was confiscated and never paid for.

In 1921, filleting machinery was introduced to New England, and nine years later, 128 filleting plants operated in the region, selling off their waste to fish meal factories, which were also proliferating. Once freezing and filleting were put together, “fish fillets” became a leading product. Scrod, a small cod fillet, became increasingly popular. The word was used in the United States at least as early as 1849, though its origin seems to be a Dutch word, schrode, meaning “strip.” Once filleting became industrialized, scrod became a household word.

But scrod was also sometimes haddock. The distinction between one groundfish and another was becoming less and less clear as fish was popularized in inland regions. Throughout the centuries, whenever cod has been popularized away from its native waters, there has been a tendency to call it simply “fish.” Stockfish was originally supposed to mean dried cod but over the centuries came to be any dried gadiform. Cod and other salted gadiforms were all known in the British West Indies as saltfish. Now the same was happening with frozen fish. Consumers who previously had not been seafood eaters—some of them had never seen a saltwater species in its uncut, natural state—were buying “fish” fillets or sticks. The type of fish was seldom specified. They were thought to be cod, though increasingly they were made from haddock, until that was replaced by a boom in redfish. Today, fish sticks are usually Pacific pollock. “Fish,” it seems, is whatever is left.

Fish sticks became an enormous commercial success. Fish fillets were frozen into blocks, which were then run through a saw and sliced into slabs, which were then cut into sticks. A Gorton’s advertisement of the 1950s called fish sticks “the latest, greatest achievement of the seafood industry of today.” It went on to say, “Thanks to fish sticks, the average American homemaker no longer considers serving fish a drudgery. Instead, she regards it as a pleasure, just as her family have come to consider fish one of their favorite foods. Easy to prepare, thrifty to serve and delicious to eat, fish sticks, it can be truthfully said, have greatly increased the demand