They were whalers, able to travel vast distances whaling because they had learned to salt-cure cod, a better technique than the Vikings' air-drying. They survived, says Kurlansky, because the Vikings had learned to 'preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank.' What they didn't break off and eat themselves, the Vikings traded in northern Europe.īut medieval Basques were the top cod traders. And in about 985 Eirik's son, Leif, pushed on to North America. The bloodthirsty band pushed on to Greenland.

Eirik and his dad traveled to Iceland, 'where they killed more people and were again expelled,' too empathically challenged even for Vikings. And, as Kurlansky says of the bereft Petty Harbor fishermen, 'they are at the wrong end of a 1,000-year fishing spree.'Įmile Zola, in 1873, wrote of 'salt cod, spreading itself before the drab, hefty shop keepers, making them dream of departure, of travel.' History's first known cod-powered traveler, as Kurlansky tells it, was Eirik the Red, thrown out of Norway, with his father, for murder. This book is a cod-angled look at European and North American history. The director of that country's national library countered with a treatise on cod-head-eating's social values, such as the ancient Icelandic belief that it increases intelligence.īut Kurlansky also ponders why the Atlantic cod, which can grow as big as a heavyweight boxer and once thrived by the millions in the North Sea and off Iceland, and on the Grand Banks and the Georges Bank, is now commercially extinct almost everywhere.

In 1914, a prominent banker subjected cod-head ingestion to economic analysis (based on a mathematical formula that factored in eating time) and proclaimed the practice nutritionally inefficient. He provides asides, too, on arcane and intriguing subjects, such as Iceland's dispute over eating cod heads. In an afterword he gives us 600 years of cod recipes, such as Norwegian dried cod soaked in lye. Senate.īy the end of Cod, we know why Kurlansky subtitles his book A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.

Also, the cod are gone because Englishmen crave fish and chips, and Basques want a codfish dish called bacalao a la Vizcaina and kids need cod-liver oil and New Englanders have always had a hankering for cod chowder, which Daniel Webster once orated upon in the U.S. And who is to blame for the dearth of cod?īy the end of Mark Kurlansky's Cod, we know nobody is to blame, except the entire human race, and only because we are such phenomenally proficient predators. 'Not a whale, nothing,' says a cod fisherman in Petty Harbor, Newfoundland, squinting forlornly out into the Atlantic, toward Ireland. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World

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