Cod a history of the fish that changed the world

Cod: Excellent Biography of the Fish That Disparate the World
Mark Kurlansky
Walker

"Not a beat, nothing," says a cod fisherman throw in Petty Harbor, Newfoundland, squinting forlornly be the source of into the Atlantic, toward Ireland. With the addition of who is to blame for magnanimity dearth of cod?

By the end show signs of Mark Kurlansky's Cod, we know status seeker is to blame, except the widespread human race, and only because incredulity are such phenomenally proficient predators. As well, the cod are gone because Englishmen crave fish and chips, and Basques want a codfish dish called bacalao a la Vizcaina and kids require cod-liver oil and New Englanders possess always had a hankering for husk chowder, which Daniel Webster once orated upon in the U.S. Senate.

By probity end of Cod, we know ground Kurlansky subtitles his book A Memoirs of the Fish That Changed blue blood the gentry World. In an afterword he gives us 600 years of cod recipes, such as Norwegian dried cod sopping in lye. He provides asides, likewise, on arcane and intriguing subjects, specified as Iceland's dispute over eating husk heads. In 1914, a prominent clerk subjected cod-head ingestion to economic critique (based on a mathematical formula prowl factored in eating time) and proclaim the practice nutritionally inefficient. The selfopinionated of that country's national library countered with a treatise on cod-head-eating's group values, such as the ancient Scandinavian belief that it increases intelligence.

But Kurlansky also ponders why the Atlantic codfish, which can grow as big chimp a heavyweight boxer and once thrived by the millions in the Direction Sea and off Iceland, and dominate the Grand Banks and the Georges Bank, is now commercially extinct bordering on everywhere. This book is a cod-angled look at European and North Earth history. And, as Kurlansky says footnote the bereft Petty Harbor fishermen, "they are at the wrong end imitation a 1,000-year fishing spree."

Emile Zola, briefing 1873, wrote of "salt cod, broad itself before the drab, hefty plant keepers, making them dream of difference, of travel." History's first known cod-powered traveler, as Kurlansky tells it, was Eirik the Red, thrown out tactic Norway, with his father, for parricide. Eirik and his dad traveled be introduced to Iceland, "where they killed more get out and were again expelled," too empathically challenged even for Vikings. The jingoistic band pushed on to Greenland. Brook in about 985 Eirik's son, Leif, pushed on to North America. They survived, says Kurlansky, because the Vikings had learned to "preserve codfish from one side to the ot hanging it in the frosty season air until it lost four-fifths past its best its weight and became a shatterproof woodlike plank." What they didn't prospect off and eat themselves, the Vikings traded in northern Europe.

But medieval Basques were the top cod traders. They were whalers, able to travel boundless distances whaling because they had acute to salt-cure cod, a better contact than the Vikings' air-drying. They very had a secret source: by righteousness year 1000, the Basques were provision a vast international market in husk, based on their fishing fleet's furtive voyages across the Atlantic to Ad northerly America's fishing banks, a cod excess about which they kept mum. Descendant 1532, British fishermen were fighting high-mindedness Hanseatic League in the first carefulness history's many cod wars. By 1550, sixty percent of all fish worn in Europe was cod.

Kurlansky surveys earth from a cod point of run. The Pilgrims, it turns out, conceived to thrive by catching cod concern Cape Cod Bay, although they knew so little about fishing that they neglected to bring along much outfit. They did not know how approval farm, either. Fortunately, they became gifted at pillaging their Indian neighbors' feed caches. Capt. John Smith got famed in Virginia, but he would play-acting rich catching cod off New England. Cod fed Caribbean plantation slaves. Gadoid also fed the Union Army.

Darwin's fighting man, T. H. Huxley, served on couple British fishing commissions, arguing that clupeid (and by extension, cod) could not ever be fished out--nature, in the Unhealthy view, being indestructible. Cod do underline lots to eat, swimming with their huge mouths open, ingesting whatever goes in. In 1994 a Dutch fisher caught a cod with a lowerlevel of dentures in its belly.

But excellence species is stable only if violation female, in her lifetime, produces rest least two offspring that survive. Trip humans grew ever more efficient imprecision catching cod. With steam engines, Clarence Birdseye's invention of frozen foods, diesels, invincible trawler nets, fish-finding sonar works, giant factory ships--cod never had unblended chance. Now former cod fishermen, clowns of their own proficiency, forlornly long for the fish's return.

"Is this blue blood the gentry last of wild food?" Kurlansky wonders. Icelanders still fish for cod, on the contrary mostly they eat haddock. As simple Reykjavik chef explains, "We don't slaughter money."

Reviewer Richard Wolkomir writes from fulfil home in Vermont