BOOKS
Let the chips fall where they may
Philip Hensher
COD: A BIOGRAPHY OF THE FISH THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Mark Kurlansky Cape, £12.99, pp. 294
o many post-modern novels have been written with this sort of title over the last few years that it might be worth saying that this is a perfectly serious history of cod, and not, as it were, a cod-history; Mark Kurlansky is not, as the Irish say, codding about. The idioms rise easily to the mouth, and one of the interesting and strange things about cod is how readily, like the names of other English fish, it strikes us as Slightly absurd, Haddock, halibut, eel, cod; they all sound like the punchline to a Victoria Wood sketch.
I don't know why; it might have some- thing to do with the obscure origins of the names of fish, which, in English, rarely come from anything meaningful and hardly relate to each other at all. German names of fish tend to illustrate the biological rela- tionship between Butt (flounder), say, and Heilbutt (halibut). English seems just to have plucked some random sounds out of the air to name cod, haddock or brill, on each of which the etymological analysis of the OED declares itself baffled, before Passing on to the clearer waters of halibut (a holy flatfish, oddly enough, fit, perhaps, to be eaten on fast days). They sound funny because they are familiar objects with meaningless names. Thomas Love Peacock's Dr Opimian, in Glyn Grange, thought that the only good fish were monosyllables or disyllables — 'only two trisyllables worth naming, anchovy and mackerel, unless anyone should be dis- posed to stand up for halibut, which for my Part I have excommunicated' — but he doesn't tell us why most of them are intrin- sically amusing.
All this slightly unhelpful rambling is meant to show something of the range and implications of Mark Kurlansky's subject, and the way in which a concentrated histor- ical look at a single, unconsidered part of our lives is apt to inspire all sorts of idle bathtirne musing in the reader. It's quite nice timing for a history of cod, since just now it seems to be as much of a staple on Chic restaurant menus, served up on a bed of frites with a tomato coulls, as it ever was for Icelandic or Newfoundland peasants. Cod is decidedly fashionable at the moment; ironically homely in suggestion but, due to over-fishing, quickly turning into something of a luxury food.
It is fair to say that current speculations that cod could ever become a rare food would have amazed previous generations. On the discovery of America, it was so Plentiful that on parts of the coast it was necessary only to let down baskets into the sea, teeming with cod. The resource stimu- lated a European demand which was already huge, due to taste as much as to the religious requirement of a minimum of one fish-eating day a week. Pretty soon, European fleets were fighting over the grounds; pretty soon too Americans had finally learnt to fish — the Pilgrim Fathers hadn't the faintest idea — and had become rich without even trying.
Cod in the 17th century for America was what oil or the railways would later become, a single resource, enough to make a man rich and to make a community pros- perous. Eighteenth-century American art, with an eye more on the symbolic than the aesthetically appealing, is always including a gawping cod; the Massachusetts legisla- ture's imitation of the Woolsack was a wooden cod, hung from the ceiling, to remind its members of the source of their wealth. You know roughly what happens next; taxation without representation and the Boston Tea Party, and if you don't this will take you through the whole thing. But the role of cod in the whole business is cer- tainly a crucial one, and, viewed as a debate over the right of Americans to sell their own fish, the American Revolution seems a more understandable, if rather less high-minded enterprise than the way it is customarily presented.
The interesting question in all this is really that of the preservation of food. The
techniques of food preservation, developed to get the cod from Newfoundland back to the great markets in Europe, were not sophisticated, but they were effective. Salt cod is a staple food in the Caribbean and South America, in Spain and especially Portugal, in Scandinavia and the Baltic. Curious that those countries, with ample access to fresh fish, should have developed such a taste for salt cod and kept it long after the advent of more advanced methods of preservation; it's odd to watch Brazilians in the market turn up their noses at glisten- ing, huge sea-bass in favour of something that looks like a plank of wood. Salt cod was very convincingly used, in the film Babette's Feast, to suggest the culinary depths to which the exiled Parisian chef had sunk, and even more convincingly described by Auden as tasting, after recon- stitution, like the soles of one's feet, and before, like toe-nails. But plenty of people seem to like it, and have gone on liking it after the invention of freezing by Clarence Birdseye. (Incidentally, the existence of a Mr Birdseye, after the recent revelation that the Kellwood Chef was invented by a Ken Wood, came as thrilling news. What next? Can Mr Whippy still be alive and well?) All these salt-cod-eaters don't neces- sarily regard it as their favourite dish — lecherous Puerto Ricans are said to remark on seeing a beautiful, unavailable woman, 'All that meat, and I'm stuck with eating salt cod' — but it's always there, and always acceptable.
Mark Kurlansky has written quite an interesting book about this enormous resource. Occasionally he cannot resist the temptation to wander off the point into more glamorous subjects, such as the well- fished waters of the causes of the American Revolution. Some of his culinary com- ments, too, seem a bit off-beam:
Newfoundlanders are accustomed to fresh, white flaky cod 'with nerves still tingling', as one fisherman's daughter put it. Only fishing communities know what real fresh cod, with thick white flakes that come apart, tastes like.
Fish doesn't need to be hung like game, but there are certain fish, like skate, which should be kept for some time after being caught. Cod straight out of the water won't hold together as well, and the New Orleans chef Kurlansky cites who complained that a shipment was too fresh wasn't altogether the idiot he is here made to sound. I'm a bit dubious about some of the long-term historical analysis, too, such as Kurlansky's suggestion that the regulation of the molasses trade in 1733 was 'one of the first inadvertent steps towards dismantling the British empire'.
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