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Alexandre Dumas gave these tips on selecting cod: “Choose a handsome spotted cod from Ostende or the Channel.... the best have white skin and yellow spots.” He also offered the following recipe:

BREADED COD

Cut the cod in five or six pieces, marinate with salt, pepper, parsley, shallots, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, green onions, basil; all chopped, the juice of two lemons and melted butter, prepare it with the marinade and bread it and cook it in a country oven.

—Alexandre Dumas,

Le Grande Dictionnaire de cuisine, 1873 (posthumous)

COD BONDING

Wherever there are Norwegian communities, there are cod clubs. There is one in New York and four in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The clubs are usually exclusively for men. According to Bjarne Grindem, the former Norwegian consul in Minneapolis, three of the four in the Twin Cities are all men, and the fourth is “more liberal.” Although cod clubs claim to be exclusive and applicants wait for years for a place, each club has as many as 200 members. One hundred or more men get together once a month at lunchtime, and the meal is always boiled cod and potatoes with melted butter served with aquavit and flat bread, called kavli. “Whether they get together to get together or get together to eat cod is another question, but they always get together around the cod,” said Grindem. The oldest, most exclusive of the Twin City clubs is the Norwegian Codfish Club at the Interlochen country club in Edina. While the members gave lectures on the exact way to prepare a boiled cod, never letting the water actually boil, the kitchen at the Interlochen was more prosaic: “You mix salt water and bring to a boil and put the fish in and cover and cook for half an hour. It’s a good thick fish, about a pound a person.”

THE LAST OF THE NORTHERN STOCK

Stella’s is a popular, cozy little restaurant on the St. John’s waterfront. Miraculously, one day the restaurant was able to buy enough large, thick, cod fillets from the Sentinel Fishery to put this old standard back on the menu for one night—just a teaser, reminding Newfoundlanders of what they were missing. Stella’s defies Newfoundland tradition and refuses to use pork fat, understandably regarding it as unhealthy.

PANFRIED COD

4 fresh cod fillets

2 eggs beaten with ¼ cup milk

1 cup flour mixed with 1 teaspoon paprika, ¼ teaspoon

black pepper, 1 teaspoon parsley

Dip fish in egg mixture, then in flour mixture. Have pan hot. Then fry in vegetable oil-very hot, then as soon as you put the fish in, turn it down.

—Mary Thornhill, Stella’s Restaurant, St. John‘s, 1996

MEASUREMENT EQUIVALENTS

Bibliography

GENERAL HISTORY

Auden, W. H., and Louis MacNeice. Letters from Iceland. London : Faber and Faber, 1967.

Babson, John J. History of the Town of Gloucester, Cape Ann. Introduction by Joseph E. Garland. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1972.

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans. 3 vols. Vol. 1, The Colonial Experience. Vol. 2, The National Experience. Vol. 3, The Democratic Experience. New York: Random House, 1958, 1965, 1973.

Davant, Jean-Louis. Histoire du Peuple Basque. Bayonne: Elkor, 1996.

Draper, Theodore. A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution. New York: Times, 1996.

Fabre-Vassas, Claudine. The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians and the Pig, trans. Carol Volk. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Felt, Joseph B. Annals of Salem. Vol. 1 Boston: W. and S. B. Ives, 1945.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. Man’s Place in Nature and Other Essays. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1906.

Lukas, J. Anthony. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. New York: Knopf, 1985.

Massachusetts House of Representatives, compiled by a committee of the House. A History of the Emblem of the Codfish in the Hall of the House of Representatives. Boston: Wright and Potter Printing, 1895.

Miller, William Lee. Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York, Knopf, 1995.

Morison, Samuel Eliot.