Cod (5 page)

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 Spain 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.

But to the commercial fisherman, there have always been five kinds of gadiform: the Atlantic cod, the haddock, the pollock, the whiting, and the hake. Increasingly, a sixth gadiform must be added to the list, the Pacific cod,
Gadus macrocephalus,
a smaller version of the Atlantic cod whose flesh is judged of only slightly lesser quality.

Engraving by William Lizars from
Jardine's Naturalist's Library,
1833.

 

The Atlantic cod, however, is the largest, with the whitest meat. In the water, its five fins unfurl, giving an elegant form that is streamlined by a curving white stripe up the sides. It is also recognizable by a square rather than forked tail and a curious little appendage on the chin, which biologists think is used for feeling the ocean floor.

The smaller haddock has a similar form but is charcoal-colored on the back where the cod is spotted browns and ambers; it also has a black spot on both sides above the pectoral fin. The stripe on a haddock is black instead of white. In New England, there is a traditional explanation for this difference. There, cod is sometimes referred to as “the sacred cod.” In truth, this is because it has earned New Englanders so many sacred dollars. But according to New England folklore, it was the fish that Christ multiplied to feed the masses. In the legend, Satan tried to do the same thing, but since his hands were burning hot, the fish wriggled away. The burn mark of Satan's thumb and forefinger left black stripes; hence the haddock.

This story illustrates the difference, not only in stripes but in status, between cod and haddock. British and Icelandic fishermen only reluctantly catch haddock after their cod quotas are filled, because cod always brings a better price. Yet Icelanders prefer eating haddock and rarely eat cod except dried. Asked why this is so, Reykjavik chef Úlfar Eysteinsson said, “We don't eat money.”

The stars are
tout morue,
and cod is money; haddock is simply food. The Nova Scotians, true to their name-sakes, prefer haddock, even for fish-and-chips, which would be considered a travesty in Newfoundland and virtually a fraud in the south of England. In the north of England, as in Scotland, haddock is preferred.

In places far from the range of Atlantic cod, hake is a substitute. The rare gadiform that is found in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, hake is a popular fish, fresh and cured, off of Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, and especially South Africa. Basques, who prize salt cod above all other fish, would rather eat a fresh hake than a fresh cod, which few have ever even seen. Because hake is found in waters closer to Spain, including the Mediterranean,
cod
has come to mean “cured,” while
hake
means “fresh.” Some Basque chefs say they prefer hake tongues to cod tongues, but what they are really saying is they prefer fresh tongues to cured ones.

Cod is the fish of choice for curing, though all of the other gadiforms are cured too, often now as a less costly substitute for cod. Salt ling is a Scottish tradition, and speldings, wind-dried whiting wetted with seawater as they dried to give a special taste, became a local specialty north of Aberdeen in the eighteenth century. At the same time, south of Aberdeen, haddocks were being dried on shore and smoked over peat and seaweed fires by the wives of the fishermen of Findon—which is the origin of the still-celebrated finnan haddie. This has achieved such status that an occasional bogus smoked cod is passed off in the United States as finnan haddie, while a salted haddock might be passed off as salt cod.

But in spite of the occasional local preference, on the world market, cod is the prize. This was true in past centuries when it was in demand as an inexpensive, long-lasting source of nutrition, and it is true today as an increasingly expensive delicacy. Even with the Grand Banks closed, worldwide more than six million tons of gadiform fish are caught in a year, and more than half are
Gadus morhua,
the Atlantic cod. For fishermen, who are extremely tradition bound, there is status in fishing cod. Proud cod fishermen are indignant, or at least saddened, by the suggestion that they should switch to what they see as lesser species.

 

In addition to its culinary qualities, the cod is eminently catchable. It prefers shallow water, only rarely venturing to 1,800 feet, and it is commonly found in 120 feet (twenty fathoms) or less. Cod migrate for spawning, moving into still-shallower water close to coastlines, seeking warmer spawning grounds and making it even easier to catch them.

They break off into subgroups, which adapt to specific areas, varying in size and color, from yellow to brown to green to gray, depending on local conditions. In the dark waters off of Iceland, they are brown with yellow specks, but it takes only two days in the brightly lit tank of an aquarium in the Westman Islands, off of Iceland, for a cod to turn so pale it looks almost albino. The so-called northern stock, the cod off of Newfoundland and Labrador, are smaller for their age than the cod off of Massachusetts, where the water is warmer. Though always a cold-water fish, preferring water temperatures between thirty-four and fifty degrees, cod grows faster in the warmer waters of its range. Historically, but not in recent years because of overfishing, the cod stock off of Massachusetts was the largest and meatiest in the world.

Cod manufacture a protein that functions like antifreeze and enables the fish to survive freezing temperatures. If hauled up by a fisherman from freezing water, which rarely happens since they are then underneath ice, the protein will stop functioning and the fish will instantly crystallize.

Cod feed on the sea life that clusters where warm and cold currents brush each other—where the Gulf Stream passes by the Labrador current off North America, and again where it meets arctic currents off the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Russia. The Pacific cod is found off of Alaska, where the warm Japanese current touches the arctic current. In fact, the cod follow this edge of warm and cold currents so consistently that some scientists believe the shifting of weather patterns can be monitored by noting where fishermen find cod. When cold northern waters become too cold, the cod populations move south, and in warmer years they move north.

From Newfoundland to southern New England, there is a series of shallow areas called banks, the southernmost being Georges Bank off of Massachusetts, which is larger than the state. Several large banks off of Newfoundland and Labrador are together called the Grand Banks. The largest of the Grand Banks, known as the Grand Bank, is larger than Newfoundland. These are huge shoals on the edge of the North American continental shelf. The area is rich in phytoplankton, a growth produced from the nitrates stirred up by the conflicting currents. Zooplankton, tiny sea creatures, gorge themselves on the phytoplankton. Tiny shrimplike free-floating creatures called krill eat the zooplankton. Herring and other midwater species rise to eat the krill near the surface, and seabirds dive for both the krill and the fish. Humpback whales also feed on krill. And it is this rich environment on the banks that produces cod by the millions. In the North Sea, the cod grounds are also found on banks, but the North American banks, where the waters of the Gulf of Mexico meet the arctic Greenland waters, had a greater density of cod than anything ever seen in Europe. This was the Basques' secret.

Still more good news for the fishermen, a female cod forty inches (102 centimeters) long can produce three million eggs in a spawning. A fish ten inches longer can produce nine million eggs. A cod may live to be twenty or even thirty years old, but it is the size more than the age that determines its fecundity. Dumas's image of all the eggs hatching so that someone could walk across the ocean on the backs of cod is typical nineteenth-century enthusiasm about the abundance of the species. But it could never happen. In the order of nature, a cod produces such a quantity of eggs precisely because so few will reach maturity. The free-floating eggs are mostly destroyed as they are tossed around the ocean's surface, or they are eaten by other species. After a couple of weeks, the few surviving eggs hatch and hungrily feed, first on phytoplankton and soon zooplankton and then krill. That is, if they can get to those foods before the other fish, birds, and whales. The few cod larvae that are not eaten or starved in the first three weeks will grow to about an inch and a half. The little transparent fish, called juveniles, then leave the upper ocean and begin their life on the bottom, where they look for gravel and other rough surfaces in which to hide from their many predators, including hungry adult cod. A huge crop of eggs is necessary for a healthy class, as biologists call them, of juveniles. If each female cod in a lifetime of millions of eggs produces two juveniles that live to be sexually mature adults, the population is stable. The first year is the hardest to survive. After that, the cod has few predators and many prey. Because a cod will eat most anything, it adapts its diet to local conditions, eating mollusks in the Gulf of Maine, and herring, capelin, and squid in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Atlantic cod is particularly resistant to parasites and diseases, far more so than haddock and whiting.

If ever there was a fish made to endure, it is the Atlantic cod—the common fish. But it has among its predators man, an openmouthed species greedier than cod.