Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [43]
Really fresh cod, not overcooked, falls apart in large firm creamy flakes, and the bones are easy to avoid. Its clean aplomb can be toned down to delicacy with a fine sauce, or underlined with shellfish or bacon, tomatoes, peppers, spices, wine. In batter, quick from the pan with a squeeze of lemon, it is perfect food for hungry people. Smashed down in the blender or processor, cod makes an excellent fish pudding. I use it as a substitute for unobtainable species of fish when trying out a stew. The cod chowders of America’s eastern seaboard are infinitely variable, warming food for a cold night.
Cod may not yet be regarded as an epicure’s delight, but as the fish of human martyrdom, of the tragedy of lost lives, it does have a splendid novel to itself. In Pêcheurs d’Islande, Pierre Loti turned the sufferings of this dangerous trade into a work of art, a sustained elegy for the tough, inarticulate Bretons who spent the summer in a frail ‘house of planks’, rocking on the North Sea in the pale void of the nights, ‘under the gaze of this sort of spectral eye which was the sun’. Beneath them, the ‘innumerable fish, myriads and myriads, all alike, gliding noiselessly in the same direction, as if they had a goal in their perpetual journeying. They were the cod which were executing their evolutions together… Sometimes, with a sudden stroke of the tail, they all turned together, showing the gleam of their silvered bellies and then the same stroke of tail, the same turn were propagated through the entire shoal in slow undulations, as if thousands of metal blades had given, under water, each a little flash.’ Again and again, one of the men – who worked in pairs – hauled in the lines heavy with fish, the live cod allowed themselves to be caught, ‘it was rapid and incessant, this silent fishing. The other gutted with his large knife, flattened, salted and counted, and all the time the soused fish which was to make their fortune on their return was piling up behind them, streaming and fresh.’
Nowadays, the cod fishermen spend winters there as well, in vast modern trawlers with wireless, and refrigerated chambers for the catch. They have a better chance against the ice and tumult of those bitter seasons off Iceland and the North Cape. It is still hard going, though, for the smaller inshore boats out from the Massachusetts ports, whose living is so precarious that they turn for home at the last possible moment, fearing to lose any possible chance of the fish that may just turn their sorties from loss to profit.
Some years ago, I was ticked off by a reader on account of my liking for salt cod. ‘Poverty food,’ she said, ‘and in this country, we are beyond the need for that kind of thing.’ Certainly the need for salt fish inland for the many fast days of Christianity long ago is no longer with us. The Reformation saw to that and, if it hadn’t, modern refrigerated transport would have done so in our time. Now we can eat it for pure pleasure, an extra item in our diet, just as buckling or kippers, ham or bacon, make extra variations on the basic themes of herring and pork.
Salt cod was originally the product of Holland and Scandinavia in the Middle Ages. I have read that Portuguese fishermen who were also after the cod in Greenland waters were setting up their drying tenters on the shores of America and Canada decades before Columbus set sail in 1492. Portugal is reputed to have a salt cod recipe for each day of the year: certainly my own favourite salt cod recipe is Portuguese (p. 103), followed by the creamy savoury pounded salt cod made in Languedoc and northern Italy. It is interesting that the best recipes all come from the destinations of the trade, rather than from its original homes in