Catholicism gave the Basques their great opportunity. The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating “cold” foods was permitted. Because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food. The Basques were already selling whale meat to Catholics on “lean days,” which, since Friday was the day of Christ’s crucifixion, included all Fridays, the forty days of Lent, and various other days of note on the religious calendar. In total, meat was forbidden for almost half the days of the year, and those lean days eventually became salt cod days. Cod became almost a religious icon—a mythological crusader for Christian observance.
The Basques were getting richer every Friday. But where was all this cod coming from? The Basques, who had never even said where they came from, kept their secret. By the fifteenth century, this was no longer easy to do, because cod had become widely recognized as a highly profitable commodity and commercial interests around Europe were looking for new cod grounds. There were cod off of Iceland and in the North Sea, but the Scandinavians, who had been fishing cod in those waters for thousands of years, had not seen the Basques. The British, who had been fishing for cod well offshore since Roman times, did not run across Basque fishermen even in the fourteenth century, when British fishermen began venturing up to Icelandic waters. The Bretons, who tried to follow the Basques, began talking of a land across the sea.
Bench ends from St. Nicolas’ Chapel in a town by the North Sea, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England, carved circa 1415, depict the cod fishery. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
In the 1480s, a conflict was brewing between Bristol merchants and the Hanseatic League. The league had been formed in thirteenth-century Lübeck to regulate trade and stand up for the interests of the merchant class in northern German towns. Hanse means “fellowship” in Middle High German. This fellowship organized town by town and spread throughout northern Europe, including London. By controlling the mouths of all the major rivers that ran north from central Europe, from the Rhine to the Vistula, the league was able to control much of European trade and especially Baltic trade. By the fourteenth century, it had chapters as far north as Iceland, as far east as Riga, south to the Ukraine, and west to Venice.
For many years, the league was seen as a positive force in northern Europe. It stood up against the abuses of monarchs, stopped piracy, dredged channels, and built lighthouses. In England, league members were called Easterlings because they came from the east, and their good reputation is reflected in the word sterling, which comes from Easterling and means “of assured value.”
But the league grew increasingly abusive of its power and ruthless in defense of trade monopolies. In 1381, mobs rose up in England and hunted down Hanseatics, killing anyone who could not say bread and cheese with an English accent.
The Hanseatics monopolized the Baltic herring trade and in the fifteenth century attempted to do the same with dried cod. By then, dried cod had become an important product in Bristol. Bristol’s well-protected but difficult-to-navigate harbor had greatly expanded as a trade center because of its location between Iceland and the Mediterranean. It had become a leading port for dried cod from Iceland and wine, especially sherry, from Spain. But in 1475, the Hanseatic League cut off Bristol merchants from buying Icelandic cod.
Thomas Croft, a wealthy Bristol customs official, trying to find a new source of cod, went into partnership with John Jay, a Bristol merchant who had what was at the time a Bristol obsession: He believed that somewhere in the Atlantic was an island called Hy-Brasil. In 1480, Jay sent his first ship in search of this island, which he hoped would offer a new fishing base for cod. In 1481, Jay and Croft outfitted two more ships, the Trinity and the George. No record exists of the result of this enterprise. Croft and Jay were as silent as the Basques. They made no announcement of the discovery of Hy-Brasil, and history has written off the voyage as a failure. But they did find enough cod so that in 1490, when the Hanseatic League offered to negotiate to reopen the Iceland trade, Croft and Jay simply weren’t interested anymore.
Where was their cod coming from? It arrived in Bristol dried, and drying cannot be done on a ship deck. Since their ships sailed out of the Bristol Channel and traveled far west of Ireland and there was no land for drying fish west of Ireland—Jay had still not found Hy-Brasil—it was suppposed that Croft and Jay were buying the fish somewhere. Since it was illegal for a customs official to engage in foreign trade, Croft was prosecuted. Claiming that he had gotten the cod far out in the Atlantic, he was acquitted without any secrets being revealed.
To the glee of the British press, a letter has recently been discovered. The letter had been sent to Christopher Columbus, a decade after the Croft affair in Bristol, while Columbus was taking bows for his discovery of America. The letter, from Bristol merchants, alleged that he knew perfectly well that they had been to America already. It is not known if Columbus ever replied. He didn’t need to. Fishermen were keeping their secrets, while explorers were telling the world. Columbus had claimed the entire new world for Spain.
Then, in 1497, five years after Columbus first stumbled across the Caribbean while searching for a westward route to the spice-producing lands of Asia, Giovanni Caboto sailed from Bristol, not in search of the Bristol secret but in the hopes of finding the route to Asia that Columbus had missed. Caboto was a Genovese who is remembered by the English name John Cabot, because he undertook this voyage for Henry VII of England. The English, being in the North, were far from the spice route and so paid exceptionally high prices for spices. Cabot reasoned correctly that the British Crown and the Bristol merchants would be willing to finance a search for a northern spice route. In June, after only thirty-five days at sea, Cabot found land, though it wasn’t Asia. It was a vast, rocky coastline that was ideal for salting and drying fish, by a sea that was teeming with cod. Cabot reported on the cod as evidence of the wealth of this new land,
New Found Land, which he claimed for England. Thirty-seven years later, Jacques Cartier arrived, was credited with “discovering” the mouth of the St. Lawrence, planted a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula, and claimed it all for France. He also noted the presence of 1,000 Basque fishing vessels. But the Basques, wanting to keep a good secret, had never claimed it for anyone.
THE CODFISH LAYS A THOUSAND EGGS THE HOMELY HEN LAYS ONE. THE CODFISH NEVER CACKLES TO TELL YOU WHAT SHE’S DONE. AND SO WE SCORN THE CODFISH WHILE THE HUMBLE HEN WE PRIZE WHICH ONLY GOES TO SHOW YOU THAT IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE.
—anonymous American rhyme
THE MEDIEVAL COD CRAZE
SALT COD IS EATEN WITH MUSTARD SAUCE OR WITH MELTED FRESH BUTTER OVER IT.
—Guillaume Tirel, a.k.a. Taillevent,
Le Viandier, 1375
Taillevent, master cook to Charles V of France, left this work in a rolled manuscript. Like almost every cook who came after him, he believed that salt cod was a harsh food that needed to be enriched with fat, whereas fresh cod was a bland food that needed to be enlivened with seasoning. He offered a recipe for fresh cod, as well as several for “Jance,” a sauce that reflects the spice fashions of the day.
IN FRANCE: FRESH COD
Prepared and cooked like a red mullet, with wine when cooking; eaten with Jance. Some people put garlic with it, and others do not.
JANCE RECIPES
Cow’s milk Jance: Grind ginger and egg yolks, infuse them in cow’s milk, and boil.
Garlic Jance: Grind pepper, garlic and almonds, infuse them in good verjuice, then boil it. Put white wine in it (if you wish).
Ginger Jance: Grind ginger and almonds, but no garlic. Infuse this in verjuice, then boil it. Some people put white wine in it. [Verjuice was originally made from the acidic juice of sorrel and later the juice of unripened plums.]
IN ENGLAND: COKKES OF KELLYNG
(COCKLES OF CODLING)
In this recipe, written in Middle English, a codling is cut into cockle-size pieces.
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Take cokkes of kellyng; cut hem smalle. Do hit yn a brothe of fresch fysch or of fresh salmon; boyle hem well. Put to mylke and draw a lyour of bredde to hem with saundres, safferyn & sugure and poudyr of pepyr. Serve hit forth, & othyr fysch amonge: turbut, pyke, saumon, chopped & hewn. Sesyn hem with venyger & salt.
—from an anonymous manuscript in Yale University’s Beinecke Library, dated from the twelfth century to the fifteenth [the use of sugar argues for the fifteenth]
2: With Mouth Wide Open
IT HAS BEEN CALCULATED THAT IF NO ACCIDENT PREVENTED
THE HATCHING OF THE EGGS AND EACH EGG
REACHED MATURITY, IT WOULD TAKE ONLY THREE YEARS
TO FILL THE SEA SO THAT YOU COULD WALK ACROSS THE
ATLANTIC DRYSHOD ON THE BACKS OF COD.
—Alexandre Dumas, Le Grande Dictionnaire de cuisine, 1873
The hero, Gadus morhua, is not a nice guy.
It is built to survive. Fecund, impervious to disease and cold, feeding on most any food source, traveling to shallow waters and close to shore, it was the perfect commercial fish, and the Basques had found its richest grounds. Cod should have lasted forever, and for a very long time it was assumed that it would. As late as 1885, the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture said, “Unless the order of nature is overthrown, for centuries to come our fisheries will continue to be fertile.”
The cod is omnivorous, which is to say it will eat anything. It swims with its mouth open and swallows whatever will fit—including young cod. Knowing this, sports fishermen in New England and Maritime Canada jig for cod, a baitless means of fishing, where a lure by its appearance and motion imitates a favorite prey of the target fish. A cod jigger is a piece of lead, sometimes fashioned to resemble a herring, but often shaped like a young cod.
Yet cod might be just as attracted to an unadorned piece of lead. English fishermen say they find Styrofoam cups thrown overboard from Channel-crossing ferries in the bellies of cod.
The cod’s greed makes it easy to catch, but the fish is not much fun for sportsmen. A cod, once caught, does not fight for freedom. It simply has to be hauled up, and it is often large and heavy. New England anglers would far rather catch a bluefish than a cod. Bluefish are active hunters and furious fighters, and once hooked, a struggle ensues to reel in the line. But the bluefish angler brings home a fish with dark and oily flesh, characteristic of a midwater fighter who uses muscles for strong swimming. The cod, on the other hand, is prized for the whiteness of its flesh, the whitest of the white-fleshed fish, belonging to the order Gadiformes. The flesh is so purely white that the large flakes almost glow on the plate. Whiteness is the nature of the sluggish muscle tissue of fish that are suspended in the near-weightless environment at the bottom of the ocean. The cod will try to swim in front of an oncoming trawler net, but after about ten minutes it falls to the back of the net, exhausted. White muscles are not for strength but for quick action—the speed with which a cod, slowly cruising, will suddenly pounce on its prey.
Cod meat has virtually no fat (.3 percent) and is more than 18 percent protein, which is unusually high even for fish. And when cod is dried, the more than 80 percent of its flesh that is water having evaporated, it becomes concentrated protein—almost 80 percent protein.
There is almost no waste to a cod. The head is more flavorful than the body, especially the throat, called a tongue, and the small disks of flesh on either side, called cheeks. The air bladder, or sound, a long tube against the backbone that can fill or release gas to adjust swimming depth, is rendered to make isinglass, which is used industrially as a clarifying agent and in some glues. But sounds are also fried by codfishing peoples, or cooked in chowders or stews. The roe is eaten, fresh or smoked. Newfoundland fishermen also prize the female gonads, a two-pronged organ they call the britches, because its shape resembles a pair of pants. Britches are fried like sounds. Icelanders used to eat the milt, the sperm, in whey. The Japanese still eat cod milt. Stomachs, tripe, and livers are all eaten, and the liver oil is highly valued for its vitamins.
Icelanders stuff cod stomachs with cod liver and boil them until tender and eat them like sausages. This dish is also made in the Scottish Highlands, where its dubious popularity is not helped by the local names: Liver-Muggie or Crappin-Muggie. Cod tripe is eaten in the Mediterranean.
The skin is either eaten or cured as leather. Icelanders used to roast it and serve it with butter to children. What is left from the cod, the remaining organs and bones, makes an excellent fertilizer, although until the twentieth century, Icelanders softened the bones in sour milk and ate them too.
The word cod is of unknown origin. For something that began as food for good Catholics on the days they were to abstain from sex, it is not clear why, in several languages, the words for salt cod have come to have sexual connotations. In the English-speaking West Indies, saltfish is the common name for salt cod. In slang, saltfish means “a woman’s genitals,” and while Caribbeans do love their salt cod, it is this other meaning that is responsible for the frequent appearance of the word saltfish in Caribbean songs such as the Mighty Sparrow’s “Saltfish.”
In Middle English, cod meant “a bag or sack,” or by inference, “a scrotum,” which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary defines cod as “any case or husk in which seeds are lodged.” Does this have anything to do with the fish? Most scholars doubt it but offer no other explanation for the origin of the word. Henry David Thoreau conjectured that the fish was named after the husk of seeds because the female held so many millions of eggs.
There are other connections between codfish and pouches. In Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, where the French have fished cod since before Shakespeare’s birth, and where people still use every part of the fish, cod skin is cured into a kind of leather from which pouches are made. The same is done in Iceland. The fish might also be named for the pouch at the back of a net where the cod are trapped. On a modern trawler, this part of the net is still called the cod end.
In Great Britain since the nineteenth century, cod has meant “a joke or prank.” This may be because a codpiece was presumably far larger than the parts it advertised. However, the Danish word for cod, torsk, also has the colloquial meaning “fool.”
The French word for cod, morue, gave the Atlantic cod the second part of its Latin name. But curiously, sometime in the nineteenth century, while cod was becoming a prank in England, morue in France came to mean “a prostitute.” Historic dictionaries of the French language do not offer an explanation for this, other than that it probably started with the vendors in Paris’s Les Halles market who were given to such anthropomorphisms, especially with fish. Pimps were mackerel, which is an oily and predatory fish. By the nineteenth century, nothing so clearly represented unbridled commercialism as the salt cod. A morue is something degraded by commerce. “Yes, yes, I will desalinate you, you grande morue!” a character declares in Émile Zola’s 1877 novel, Assommoir. And when Louis Ferdinand Céline wrote that the stars are “tout morue,” it was not that they were made of salt cod but that the universe was cheapened and perverse.
In modern French, a fresh cod is called a cabillaud, which comes from the Dutch kabeljauw. The French adopted a foreign word for the fresh fish, which did not greatly interest them, but reserved a French word, morue, for salt cod, which they loved. Morue is an older word than the word cabillaud. In Quebec, where the French language has barely changed since the eighteenth century, the word cabillaud is unknown. Quebecers speak of fresh or salted morue.
To the Spanish, Italians, and Portuguese, fresh cod does not even exist, and there is really no word for it. It has to be called a “fresh salt cod.” Salt cod is baccalà in Italian and bacalhau in Portuguese, both of which may come from the Spanish word bacalao. Typical of Iberia, both the Basques and Catalans claim the word comes from their own languages, and the rest of Spa
in disagrees. Catalans have a myth that cod was the proud king of fish and was always speaking boastfully, which was an offense to God. “Va callar!” (Will you be quiet!), God told the cod in Catalan. Whatever the word’s origin, in Spain, lo que corta el bacalao, the person who cuts the salt cod, is a colloquialism for the person in charge.
Codfish include ten families with more than 200 species. Almost all live in cold salt water in the Northern Hemisphere. Cod were thought to have developed into their current forms about 120 million years ago in the Tethys Sea, a tropical sea that once ran around the earth east-west and connected all other oceans. Eventually the Tethys merged with a northern sea, and the cod became a fish of the North Atlantic. Later, when a land bridge between Asia and North America broke, cod found their way into the northern Pacific. In gadiform fish, evolution is seen in the fins. The cusk has almost a continuous single fin around the body with a barely distinct tail. The ling has a distinct tail and a small second dorsal fin. On a hake, the forward dorsal fin becomes even more distinct. On a whiting, there are three dorsal fins, and the anal (belly) side has developed two distinct fins. On the most developed gadiforms—cod, haddock, and pollock—these three dorsal and two anal fins are large and very separate.
Despite the warm-water origins, only one tropical cod remains: the tiny bregmaceros, of no commercial value and almost unknown habits. There is also one South Atlantic species and even one freshwater cod, the burbot, whose white flesh, though not quite the quality of an Atlantic cod, is enjoyed by lake fishermen in Alaska, the Great Lakes, New England, and Scandinavia. Norwegians think the burbot has a particularly delectable liver. There are other gadiforms that are pleasant to eat but of no commercial value. Sportsmen like to jig the coastline of Long Island and New England for the small tomcod, which also has a Pacific counterpart.
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