New Found Land (Photo credit: Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL)
Glo’ster girls they have no combs, Heave away, heave away!
They comb their hair with codfish bones, We’re bound for South Australia.
~~ Old sea shanty ~~
Salt Cod (Photo credit: Mark Dodds)
Bacalhau, bacalao, cabillaud (from the Dutch kabeljauw), morue (and the marvelous brandade* resulting therefrom). Gone with the waves?
Maybe.
A disturbing story in the December 15, 2008 New York Times — “A Portuguese Tradition Faces a Frozen Future” — suggests that salt cod will be going the way of the dodo bird. Or least TV dinners. Into the freezer, out of the salt.
Portuguese Christmas Eve Dinner (Photo credit: Ana Campos)
Author Elaine Sciolino says, “Bacalhau, as the fish is called here, is to Christmas Eve in Portugal what turkey is to Thanksgiving in America. Treasured since the 16th century, when Portuguese fishermen first brought it back from Newfoundland, it bore the nickname fiel amigo — faithful friend. Its correct preparation is a source of pride, a sign of respect for family values.”
Not only in Portugal. There’s Latin America, Italy, and even France, where salt cod played a mighty important role in the history of the world. Seafarers and sinners alike ate this white-fleshed fish by the tons, especially during the Age of Exploration. Governed as they were by the Roman Catholic Church’s meatless Fridays and oppressive Lenten restrictions, housewives throughout medieval Europe and in many of the later colonies invented tasty traditions out of what looks like cardboard soaked in the sea.
Soaking the Salted Codfish (Used with permission.)
Sciolino provides a few words on the preparation of this “cardboard” before it turns into something edible, and hopefully delicious: “Indeed, it is easy to work hard on bacalhau and still get it wrong. If the soaking temperature is too cold, the fibers of the fish’s flesh do not open up properly and the finished product will be too salty. If the cod is soaked too long, it will turn spongy.”
The situation is becoming so dire that SLOW FOOD ought to jump into the fray.
And this sentiment exists here in the United States, although it is not about codfish. The quick and the frozen haunt us, too. Thanksgiving in a restaurant and roast beef and mashed potatoes from a resealable plastic container. Cooking odors of chemicals, food additives, and plastic. (If you’ll permit me a personal aside here:Â I make all our bread and just walking by the plastic-bagged bread in my local grocery store is enough to make me sick. The smell of preservatives lingers; yet my friends, who eat this bread all the time, think I’m smelling cleaning fluid. I’m not … it’s only by the bread aisle that the stink crawls up my nostrils.)
I wonder what food memories children will have who eat only this bread and Mac n’ Cheese out of a box week after week?
But I digress. Or do I? This is about cod, isn’t it? Or is it about more than one fish in the sea?
Read about the history of the codfish phenomenon in Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1997). Another book with a different slant, but nonetheless insightful, is Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World, by Brian Fagan.
Photo credit: Robyn Lee
*Brandade de Morue Nîmes
[Note: For a visual rendition of the process (annotated in French), see “La Brandade de Morue: la Fausse et la Vraie” (The False and the True). This makes an excellent appetizer for use during the holiday season. CB]