Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [46]
All of these techniques are vanishing. Schools of fish are now located by sonar or by spotter aircraft, equipment developed during World War II to locate enemy submarines. Once the fish are located, the trawler can move in and clean out the area, taking not only the target catch but everything else in the area, the by-catch. As the 1950s Gorton’s advertisement put it, “Thanks to these methods, fishing is no longer the hit-or-miss proposition it was 50 years ago.”
NEW ENGLAND VISIT
In 1923, Evelene Spencer of the United States Bureau of Fisheries journeyed from her home in Portland, Oregon, to Gloucester, Massachusetts. She wrote about her visit in the Portland Oregonian. “Today 5000 [Gloucester] men sail the seas from Hatteras to the Arctic Circle.” She was particularly impressed with New England salt cod cooking. “I hope Portland does not forget her coarse food and raw cabbage. But one thing she needs to be educated in is the use of saltfish products.... I had no idea that saltfish could be so delicious until I tasted it in Gloucester.”
Then she offered two New England salt cod classics: Fish Balls and the following recipe for New England Boiled Dinner.
BOILED SALT CODFISH DINNER WITH VEGETABLES AND PORK SCRAPS
Cover the required amount of salt codfish with cold water and set on the back of the stove; when hot, pour off and cover again with cold. Change the water three or four times, allowing a half hour between. Or they may be soaked in plenty of cold water for two hours. Place in a saucepan with fresh cold water and bring to a boil, then simmer. Boiling saltfish hardens it. Add the required amount of peeled potatoes and simmer until potatoes are cooked. Gloucester says that the fish is never tough if simmered with the potatoes. Prepare beets, carrots and onions, boiling until tender. Cut slices of fat salt pork into small dice, place in a frying pan and fry out slowly until the fat is extracted and the “scraps” crisp.
Place the fish and potatoes in the center of the hot platter. Arrange the whole boiled beets, onions and carrots around the fish and potato. Put the pork fat and “scraps” in a hot gravy boat. When you are served some of each, the true Gloucester fashion is to proceed to cut up the vegetables and fish fine and mix it all together, then take a big ladle of pork fat and “scraps” and pour it over it all. I preferred to keep mine separate, so that I could enjoy the flavor of each.
—Evelene Spencer,
Portland Oregonian, 1923
9: Iceland Discovers the Finite Universe
THE TOWNS PETER OUT INTO FLAT RUSTY-BROWN LAVAFIELDS,
SCATTERED SHACKS SURROUNDED BY WIREFENCING,
STOCKFISH DRYING ON WASHING-LINES AND A
FEW WHITE HENS. FURTHER DOWN THE COAST, THE LAVA
IS DOTTED WITH WHAT LOOK LIKE HUGE LAUNDRY-BASKETS;
THESE ARE REALLY COMPACT HEAPS OF DRYING
FISH COVERED WITH TARPAULIN.
—W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland, 1967
Only a decade after reassuring the Canadians and the world that the waters around Great Britain “show no sign of exhaustion,” such a thing being scientifically impossible, the British discovered that the cod stocks in the North Sea had been depleted. Finally, in 1902, seven years after the death of Huxley, the British government began to concede that there was such a thing as overfishing. Their marvelous steel-hulled bottom draggers had already moved from the North Sea to Iceland. There they found local fishermen fishing the same way they had been when the Hanseatic League had driven the British away. Icelanders keep their traditions. They spoke, and still do, the same language as the Vikings.