Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [67]
4. Arrange it on the plate.
—Alain Senderens, chef, Paris
13: Bracing for the Spanish Armada
CONFINED AS THE LIMITS OF FIELD LANE ARE, IT HAS ITS
BARBER, ITS COFFEE-SHOP, ITS BEER-SHOP, AND ITS
FRIED-FISH WAREHOUSE.
—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, 1837-1838
In a Britain that has seen many of its most treasured traditions under siege, an issue debated with increasing frequency is the survival of true fish-and-chips. “We can foresee a time when we won’t get any chunky pieces,” said Maureen Whitehead, who with her husband owns the popular Polsloe Bridge fish-and-chips shop in Exeter, in the green hill country of east Devon. Like all people who know fresh cod, she understood the importance of thickness. “If they don’t let the small grow, that will be it,” she added.
To most, though not all, of the British working class, fish means cod. In Yorkshire, though, it means haddock, and Harry Ramsden’s, a fish-and-chips chain founded in Guiseley, Leeds, in 1928, built a reputation for more than sixty years with fried haddock. But in the 1990s, when Ramsden’s expanded into the south of England, it was forced to switch to cod. Nothing else is acceptable in the south of England, except in London.
In Dickens’s description of a thieves’ den in back-street London, he includes the basic components of a working-class commercial district. The London fried fish trade began with the industrial revolution in the 1830s. Jewish merchants in the East End and Soho fried fish and distributed it from warehouses decades before “chipped” potatoes were added. The fish was, and still is, whatever was getting a good price at Billingsgate market—cod, haddock, plaice, hake, or even skate or dogfish. In recent years, dogfish has increasingly turned up in chip shops, but only in London will shop owners admit to’this. In most of England, the disappearance of cod, and large cods at that, is a threat to a way of life.
Newlyn is a dark, brick, tumble-down-to-the-docks Cornish fishing port, a few miles from Land’s End on the most seaward tip of England. There David Jewell, another fish-and-chip shop owner, said that he cannot always offer the real fish. Fish-and-chips, the common man’s dish, must sell for a reasonably low price, and the high price of cod sometimes forces him to settle for pollock or whiting. Also, this most British of foods is often not British anymore. Fishy Moore’s, one of the oldest chip shops in England, founded in Coventry in 1891, has given up on English cod. Coventry, in the Midlands, is as far inland as any place in England can be. Yet, for eighty years, the Moore family would go by train every morning to Skegness, on the other side of England, and buy freshly landed North Sea cod. In 1968, the family sold the shop. The current owner, Shaun Britton, who learned the business from his father, said, “It is almost impossible to get good British cod. What we see on docks has been on a boat for three days.” Fishy Moore’s buys frozen cod from Iceland, Norway, or occasionally the Faroe Islands.
If there is anything as basic and universal to the British working class as fried fish, it is xenophobia. So the proposition that foreigners may be depriving British workers of their cod is politically potent. To the British fishermen, and to many British people, that is exactly what the European Community, which is now the European Union, has done. This argument, of course, denies the long British history of overfishing and the fact that the dread Spanish supertrawlers, which are now so universally denounced, were a British invention. And the rights of fishermen to have free access to the sea, a principle the British fought for with such high-minded rhetoric in Icelandic waters, was somehow forgotten each time Brussels suggested a European partner should have rights in British waters.
According to the British government, 70 percent of the species in British waters are being overfished. In the North Sea, the catch dropped from 287,000 metric tons in 1981 to 86,000 in