Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  Fannie Merritt Farmer, an enormously influential cookbook writer, believed in extremely precise instructions and popularized the idea of exact measurements for recipes, an illusion of science that has become standard practice and, for more than 100 years, has left household cooks saying, “What went wrong? I followed the recipe.” She was the most famous director of the Boston Cooking School, founded a generation earlier to teach working-class women how to cook “scientifically.” Influenced by this school, freedom of choice has slowly been exorcised from recipes, and experimenting is increasingly discouraged.

  Fannie Farmer’s chowder recipe differs greatly from previous ones not only in its precise measurements but in that it is not made in one pot and completely abandons the idea of building a chowder in layers. The following recipe is clearly designed with a stove in mind, using several pots and even more than one burner at a time. When stoves replaced hearths, the way people cooked changed.

  4 lb. cod or haddock.

  6 cups potatoes cut in ¼ inch slices, or

  4 cups potatoes cut in ¾ inch cubes.

  1 sliced onion.

  1½ inch cube fat salt pork.

  1 tablespoon salt.

  ⅛ teaspoon pepper.

  3 tablespoons butter.

  4 cups scalded milk.

  8 common crackers.

  Order the fish skinned, but head and tails left on. Cut off head and tails and remove fish from backbone. Cut fish in two-inch pieces and set aside. Put head, tail and backbone broken in pieces, in stewpan; add two cups cold water and bring slowly to a boiling point; cook twenty minutes. Cut salt pork in small pieces and try out, add onion, and fry five minutes; strain fat into stewpan. Parboil potatoes five minutes in boiling water to cover; drain, and add potatoes to fat; then add two cups boiling water and cook five minutes. Add liquor drained from bones and fish; cover, and simmer ten minutes. Add milk, salt, pepper, butter and crackers, split and soaked in enough cold milk to moisten. Pilot bread is sometimes used in place of common crackers.

  —Fannie Merritt Farmer,

  The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896

  THE LAST TERRE-NEUVAS

  In the French Channel ports, the men who fished Newfoundland were called the Terre-Neuvas. The last of them left from the Breton port of St.-Malo and the Norman port of Fecamp in the 1970s. In the campaign of 1961, the year after the following book was published, 22,000 tons of Grand Banks salt cod were still landed in Fécamp. The original French word for chowder, la chaudrée, has vanished, and here, the Marseillaise word is used for the soup.

  FÉCAMP BOUILLABAISSE

  Preparation: 30 minutes

  Ingredients: 500 gr. of salt cod, 750 gr. of potatoes, 100 gr. of onion, a few branches of celery, 1 white of a leek, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 table spoons of tomato paste, 3 table spoons of oil, 1 bouquet garni, salt, pepper, chopped parsley.

  Desalinate, poach and drain the salt cod, heat the oil in a pot. Toss in the chopped onion, the leek and the celery, also chopped. Let it cook for ten minutes. Peel the potatoes, cut them in thick rounds and cook them in the above preparation. When the potatoes are almost cooked, add the salt cod. Let it simmer slowly for ten minutes. Serve very hot, sprinkle with chopped parsley. Optional: add a little crème fraîche at the time of serving.

  This recipe won the prix Terre-Neuve.

  —Committee for Study and Information for the

  Development of Salt Cod Consumption,

  Salt Cod: The Fish, Its Preparation, Its Nutritional,

  Culinary, and Economic Qualities, Paris, 1960

  THE DIASPORA OF THE WEST INDIA CURE

  WEST AFRICA: STOCKFISH AND EGUZI

  The slave trade left West Africa with a taste for cured cod, though to most West Africans, all that remains is a tradition of salting and drying local fish. Some West African towns, such as Kaolack, Senegal, offer a sight that has vanished from Gloucester and Petty Harbour—a shore covered with miles of fish flakes. Kaolack is inland but near the coast on the Saloum River and serves as a jumping-off spot for the headwaters of the Niger, a major artery of regional trade which moves this saltfish through the sub-Sahara and Sahara. But Nigeria has hard currency from oil and can import cod. Nigerians, especially Ibos, love dried cod, which they too call stockfish. This recipe comes from an Ibo who was born in the town of Bende near the Delta, and who now lives in the United States.

  Wash the.stockfish in hot water and soak it five minutes. Then boil it for several hours until it is soft. Then add goat meat. When the goat meat is cooked add eguzi [seeds of the green squash known in Nigeria as melon]. Add onions and minced ukazi [an herbal leaf]. Add crayfish. Then stir in ugbo [a thickener made from ground seeds, which have been cooked for hours until soft].

  —Joy Okori, Washington, D.C., 1997

  BRAZIL: BACALHUA COM LEITE DE COCO

  1 pound saltcod

  1 freshly-grated coconut

  4 tablespoons butter or oil

  2 chopped onions

  2 chopped tomatoes

  2 or 3 drops hot pepper sauce

  1 tablespoon dendê oil [a palm oil from Bahia]

  Desalinate salt cod. Remove thick milk from coconut and reserve. To the residue add 2 cups hot water and remove thinned milk by pressing through a sieve. Fry saltcod in butter or oil with the onions and tomatoes and wet with the thin milk of the coconut. Cook over a low flame, occasionally stirring. When ready to serve, shake the pepper sauce on the fish, add the dendê oil and the thick coconut milk.

  —Rosa Maria, A Arte de Comer Bem, Rio de Janeiro, 1985

  .JAMAICA: CODFISH RUN DOWN

  Today, “Run Down” is usually prepared with dark, oily, local fish. But the old-fashioned way was with salt cod. Alphanso McLean makes it for friends, though it is considered “too country” to be served at his place of business.

  Grate coconut and let it sit in water. Force it through a strainer. Boil the strained liquid and keep stirring until oil comes to top. Add saltfish, onions, tomato and serve with yellow yam and green banana.

  —Alphanso McLean, chef, Terra Nova Hotel, Kingston, 1996

  Jamaica: ACKEE AND SALTFISH

  ELENA RASHLY ASKED VIOLET TO GIVE US A NATIVE DISH. SHE PRODUCED WHAT IS CALLED “SALTFISH AND ACKEE”—WHICH I AFTERWARDS FOUND DESCRIBED AS A DISH HIGHLY ESTEEMED BY THE NATIVES BUT LESS BY OTHER PEOPLE.

  —Edmund Wilson, The Sixties, 1993

  It seems that much of Wilson’s grumpiness on the subject stems from the fact that he got ackee poisoning. “I don’t remember ever suffering in such a peculiar way as this,” he wrote. Ackee is a West African fruit brought to Jamaica in 1793 by the infamous Captain Bligh, for whom it is named in botany —Blighia sapida. Like its namesake, ackee requires careful handling. The fruit, which hangs flame red from trees in the mountainous Jamaican countryside, must be fully ripe—that is, bursting open—to be safe.

  Ackee and Saltfish is regarded by Jamaicans as their national dish, but the saltfish is now so expensive that Jamaicans joke that it is their “international dish”—only the tourists can afford it. Terra Nova Hotel chef Alphanso McLean serves Jamaican breakfast (Ackee and Saltfish with fried biscuits) on the wide and breezy hotel veranda, not so much to tourists, who seldom go to Kingston, as to affluent Jamaican businessmen and politicians. The fried biscuits are called johnnycakes and are the same biscuits served for breakfast with Jamaican molasses in the other Terranova, Newfoundland. Originally from southeastern New England, they were made from cornmeal and molasses, baked with pork dripping, and called jonny cakes, the name coming from “journey cakes” because they were taken on the road. They have followed the molasses-and-salt-cod route.

  Caribbean saltfish dishes always involve shredding the fish, because it is of low quality. The saltfish, barely soaked, is hard and salty. The dishes depend on this for flavor.

  Soak ¼ pound salt cod for 20 minutes. Boil it for 10 minutes. Boil fruit from 1 dozen fresh ackee 5 minutes. Heat vegetable oil in a skillet. In the countryside we alw
ays used coconut oil, but here I use soy. Add chopped onions, scallion, thyme, and ground black pepper. That ground pepper gives it a nice flavor. Then add minced pepper [hot scotch bonnet pepper]. Add ackee and crumbled saltfish.

  —Alphanso McLean, Terra Nova Hotel, Kingston

  PUERTO RICO: SERENATA DE BACALAO

  In San Juan, Puerto Rico, La Casita Blanca is just that—a one-story white building, a neighborhood bar built in 1922, which Jesus Perez took over in 1985. It is in Barrio Obrero, a neighborhood that many people do not want to go to after dark. But with its low one- and two-story houses in turquoise and salmon it is also one of the old areas of San Juan not yet overtaken by high-rise architecture.

  Perez remembers that his family always made bacalao with roots, yams, breadfruit, yucca. “They ate it like this much more than with rice. My mother always bought whole fish hard and flat. Now I buy fillets. They are soft. They’re salted but not dried.” Drying makes the product more expensive, and since refrigeration is now widespread on the island, Puerto Ricans, and many other people throughout the developed world, cut costs by buying green cod. One salt cod dish from his childhood that has remained popular is Serenata. In St. Lucia this is called Brule Jol; in Trinidad Buljol; in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique Chiquetaille,

  2 cups salt cod, desalinated, cleaned,

  shredded, and boiled

  1 large onion, sliced

  1 garlic clove, minced

  2 hot green peppers

  ½ cup stuffed olives

  4 hardboiled eggs, sliced

  2 boiled potatoes, peeled and diced

  1 cup olive oil

  Mix it well and serve with salt and pepper to taste.

  —Jesus Perez, La Casita Blanca, San Juan, 1996

  Also see page 91.

  GUADELOUPE: FEROCE

  Carmelite Martial, when asked what her favorite saltfish dish was, replied, “Well, since I don’t really like saltfish, maybe a little feroce. I like avocados.”

  Mix avocado, kassav (cassava flour), grilled salt cod, a little hot pepper, and sunflower seed oil. Work them together with a spatula. Some people add cucumber, but it is not essential.

  —Carmelite Martial, Le Table Creole, St. Felix, Guadeloupe

  THE GREAT FRENCH DISGUISE

  TE CONOZCO, BACALAO

  AUNQUE VENGAS DESFRAZAO

  (I would know you, salt cod

  Even if you were wearing a disguise)

  —Cuban proverb

  Since at least the time of Taillevent, salt cod has always been embellished with richness because it is harsh. Butter, olive oil, cream have been used—Icelanders pour the rendered fat of lamb kidneys over it. In 1654, Louis de Bechamel, marquis de Nointel, financier in the court of Louis XIV, having invested huge sums in the Newfoundland fishery, and finding the market weak in France because Frenchmen did not like this dried and salted old fish, invented a sauce for it, which is now called bechamel sauce. The. sauce enjoyed tremendous popularity with salt cod and many other dishes. Originally it was a simple cream sauce with spices such as nutmeg. Later it was enriched with eggs:

  SALT FISH WITH CREAM

  Take good barrel-cod, and boil it; then take it all into flakes, and put it in a sauce-pan with cream, and season it with a little pepper; put in a handful of parsley scalded, and minced, and stove it gently till tender, and then shake it together with some thick butter and the yolks of two or three eggs, and dish it, and garnish with poached eggs and lemon sliced.

  —Charles Carter,

  The Compleat Practical Cook, London, 1730

  Still later, flour was added. The sauce reached its height of complexity in the early twentieth century with Auguste Escof fier’s elaborate 1921 recipe, which included chunks of veal. But a simpler flour-and-cream béchamel has remained a standard salt cod sauce in Portugal, Spain, Italy, New England (creamed codfish)—wherever salt cod is eaten.

  BALLS

  There is no single dish more common to all cod-eating cultures than the codfish ball. At the end of the nineteenth century, while the U.S. Senate debated a proposed pure food act, Senator George Frisbie Hoare, occupying the same august seat from which Daniel Webster had once extolled the virtues of chowder, rose and delivered a lengthy oration on “the exquisite flavor of the codfish, salted, made into balls, and eaten on a Sunday morning.”

  NEW ENGLAND: BETTER START ON SATURDAY

  Salt fish mashed with potatoes, with good butter or pork scraps to moisten it, is nicer the second day than it was the first. The fish should be minced very fine while it is warm. After it has gotten cold and dry it is difficult to do it nicely. There is no way of preparing salt fish for breakfast, so nice as to roll it up in little balls, after it is mixed with mashed potatoes dip it into an egg and fry it golden brown.

  —Lydia Maria Child,

  The American Frugal Housewife, Boston, 1829

  FRANCE: MORUE EN CROQUETTES

  The book in which this recipe appears was a ubiquitous classic in early-twentieth-century French households.

  When your salt cod is cooked, as directed above (put the salt cod in cold water and cook. Remove from heat the moment it is about to boil, skim it and cover), remove the skin and the bones and prepare a béchamel sauce, which you mix with the salt cod, then let it chill; it must be cold enough so that your salt cod can be rolled into balls; to do that the sauce must be thick.

  Prepare a dozen balls and roll them in fine bread crumbs, then dip them in beaten eggs, bread them a second time and put them in a very hot fryer. When they are a handsome color, remove them, stack them in a pyramid and sprinkle them with chopped parsley.

  —Tante Marie, La Véritable Cuisine de Famille, Paris, 1925

  ITALY: SALTED COD CROQUETTES

  The Italian Tante Marie was Ada Boni, editor of Italy’s leading women’s magazine, Preziosa. Her cookbook first came out in 1928. This recipe is from the fifteenth edition, translated by Mathilde La Rosa.

  1½ pounds soaked baccalà

  3 anchovy filets, chopped

  1 tablespoon chopped parsley

  ½ tablespoon pepper

  1 tablespoon grated parmesan cheese

  2 slices white bread, soaked in water and squeezed dry

  2 eggs lightly beaten

  ½ cup flour

  1 egg, lightly beaten

  Boil fish in water 30 minutes and cool. Bone skin and chop fine. Add anchovies, parsley, pepper, cheese, bread and eggs and mix very well. Shape into croquettes, roll in flour, dip into egg, roll in bread crumbs and fry in olive oil until brown all over. Frying time will be about four minutes on each side. Serves 4.

  —Ada Boni, Talismano della Felícità, 1950

  PORTUGAL: SONHOS DE BACALHAU

  1 cup shredded salted codfish

  1 cup flour

  1 cup water

  1 tablespoon butter

  salt and pepper to taste

  3 eggs

  Soak two pieces of salt dry codfish overnight. Save water. Shred fish with your fingers in very fine pieces. Measure water that you saved and bring to boil with fish, add butter and pepper, pour flour in and stir quickly until dough pulls from the side of the pan. Remove from heat and cool. Add eggs, one at a time, mix well. Fry in a deep skillet with plenty of hot oil, by dropping small spoonfuls in. Fry until golden brown. Makes about 20 to 24;

  —Deotinda Maria Avila,

  Foods of the Azores Islands, 1977

  JAMAICA: STOMP AND Go

  Mix 1 pound flour with water until it is thin.

  Add ¼ pound soaked boiled and crumbled saltfish.

  Beat in 2 eggs.

  Add a little baking powder, sauted onions, scallion,

  thyme.

  Mix together.

  Drop spoonfuls in hot oil.

  -Alphanso McLean, Terra Nova Hotel, Kingston

  PUERTO RICO : BACALAITOS

  Pupa is the popular nickname for Providencia Trabal, who is passionate about all Puerto Rican subjects. She used to demonstrate traditional
Puerto Rican cooking on television. Now she cooks for relatives in the narrow high-ceilinged kitchen of her San Juan apartment. This is how she makes Bacalaitos.

  About 2 cups wheat flour

  1 or 2 spoonfuls of baking soda

  Add to the last water from soaking the salt cod.

  Work into a thick batter.

  ½ pound already boiled salt cod crumbled in

  Add a spoonful of garlic chopped with oregano

  Add 2 spoonfuls finely chopped onions

  Add 2 spoonfuls finely chopped tomato

  Add chopped coriander leaf and culantro (local herb)

  Fry in hot corn oil dropping in a spoonful at a time from

  a ladle.

  —Providencia Trabal, San Juan, 1996

  “Aye, Que Bonita!” she exclaimed, and they are beautiful: two-inch amber puffs with the red and green of the herbs and vegetables brightened from quick cooking.

  BRANDADE

  Some believe brandade de morue began in Nimes, but it is more commonly associated with Provence. It was originally called branlade, meaning “something that is pummeled,” which it is. The dish had made it to Paris by the time of the French Revolution and never left. In 1894, writer Alphonse Daudet started a circle that met at the Café Voltaire on Place de l‘Odéon for a regular diner de la brandade.

  Since salt cod has become expensive, potatoes have been added—brandade de morue parmentier. Antoine-Auguste Parmentier was an eighteenth-century officer who popularized the potato in the French Army, and his name has ever since meant “with potatoes.” In 1886, brandade was decreed an official part of the enlisted man’s mess in the French Army. As the price of salt cod has risen, so has the amount of potatoes in the brandade. Sometimes the dish simply seems like fishy mashed potatoes. As American Sara Josepha Hale wrote in her 1841 book, The Good Housekeeper, “The salted codfish is cheap food, if potatoes are used freely with it.” The original brandade had no potatoes.