Cod (26 page)

The original ingredients were salt pork, sea biscuit, and either fresh or salt cod, all carefully layered in the pot. These ingredients are standard long-conservation provisions of a fishing ship. Sea biscuits or hardtack, which later developed specific names for different shapes and sizes, such as pilot bread or Cross Crackers, were the forerunner of the cracker—a bread too hard to go stale. Potatoes were added to chowder recipes later. Newfoundland's Fishermen's Brewis is a classic chowder, but with the liquid cooked away. (See page 11.)

In nineteenth-century New England, chowder parties became fashionable. A dozen or more people would go for a morning sail and then prepare the chowder either on board or later, on the beach. Also at this time, adding milk to chowder came into fashion, which meant that a chowder then required more than basic seagoing provisions. (See page 76.)

Fannie Merritt Farmer, an enormously influential cookbook writer, believed in extremely precise instructions and popularized the idea of exact measurements for recipes, an illusion of science that has become standard practice and, for more than 100 years, has left household cooks saying, “What went wrong? I followed the recipe.” She was the most famous director of the Boston Cooking School, founded a generation earlier to teach working-class women how to cook “scientifically.” Influenced by this school, freedom of choice has slowly been exorcised from recipes, and experimenting is increasingly discouraged.

Fannie Farmer's chowder recipe differs greatly from previous ones not only in its precise measurements but in that it is not made in one pot and completely abandons the idea of building a chowder in layers. The following recipe is clearly designed with a stove in mind, using several pots and even more than one burner at a time. When stoves replaced hearths, the way people cooked changed.

In the French Channel ports, the men who fished Newfoundland were called the Terre-Neuvas. The last of them left from the Breton port of St.-Malo and the Norman port of Fecamp in the 1970s. In the campaign of 1961, the year after the following book was published, 22,000 tons of Grand Banks salt cod were still landed in Fécamp. The original French word for chowder, la
chaudrée,
has vanished, and here, the Marseillaise word is used for the soup.

The slave trade left West Africa with a taste for cured cod, though to most West Africans, all that remains is a tradition of salting and drying local fish. Some West African towns, such as Kaolack, Senegal, offer a sight that has vanished from Gloucester and Petty Harbour—a shore covered with miles of fish flakes. Kaolack is inland but near the coast on the Saloum River and serves as a jumping-off spot for the headwaters of the Niger, a major artery of regional trade which moves this saltfish through the sub-Sahara and Sahara. But Nigeria has hard currency from oil and can import cod. Nigerians, especially Ibos, love dried cod, which they too call stockfish. This recipe comes from an Ibo who was born in the town of Bende near the Delta, and who now lives in the United States.

Today, “Run Down” is usually prepared with dark, oily, local fish. But the old-fashioned way was with salt cod. Alphanso McLean makes it for friends, though it is considered “too country” to be served at his place of business.

—Alphanso McLean, chef, Terra Nova Hotel, Kingston, 1996

ELENA RASHLY ASKED VIOLET TO GIVE US A NATIVE DISH. SHE PRODUCED WHAT IS CALLED “SALTFISH AND ACKEE”—WHICH I AFTERWARDS FOUND DESCRIBED AS A DISH HIGHLY ESTEEMED BY THE NATIVES BUT LESS BY OTHER PEOPLE.

—Edmund Wilson, The Sixties, 1993

It seems that much of Wilson's grumpiness on the subject stems from the fact that he got ackee poisoning. “I don't remember ever suffering in such a peculiar way as this,” he wrote. Ackee is a West African fruit brought to Jamaica in 1793 by the infamous Captain Bligh, for whom it is named in botany —
Blighia
sapida. Like its namesake, ackee requires careful handling. The fruit, which hangs flame red from trees in the mountainous Jamaican countryside, must be fully ripe—that is, bursting open—to be safe.

Ackee and Saltfish is regarded by Jamaicans as their national dish, but the saltfish is now so expensive that Jamaicans joke that it is their “international dish”—only the tourists can afford it. Terra Nova Hotel chef Alphanso McLean serves Jamaican breakfast (Ackee and Saltfish with fried biscuits) on the wide and breezy hotel veranda, not so much to tourists, who seldom go to Kingston, as to affluent Jamaican businessmen and politicians. The fried biscuits are called johnnycakes and are the same biscuits served for breakfast with Jamaican molasses in the other Terranova, Newfoundland. Originally from southeastern New England, they were made from cornmeal and molasses, baked with pork dripping, and called jonny cakes, the name coming from “journey cakes” because they were taken on the road. They have followed the molasses-and-salt-cod route.

Caribbean saltfish dishes always involve shredding the fish, because it is of low quality. The saltfish, barely soaked, is hard and salty. The dishes depend on this for flavor.

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, La Casita Blanca is just that—a one-story white building, a neighborhood bar built in 1922, which Jesus Perez took over in 1985. It is in Barrio Obrero, a neighborhood that many people do not want to go to after dark. But with its low one- and two-story houses in turquoise and salmon it is also one of the old areas of San Juan not yet overtaken by high-rise architecture.

Perez remembers that his family always made bacalao with roots, yams, breadfruit, yucca. “They ate it like this much more than with rice. My mother always bought whole fish hard and flat. Now I buy fillets. They are soft. They're salted but not dried.” Drying makes the product more expensive, and since refrigeration is now widespread on the island, Puerto Ricans, and many other people throughout the developed world, cut costs by buying green cod. One salt cod dish from his childhood that has remained popular is
Serenata.
In St. Lucia this is called
Brule
Jol; in Trinidad Buljol; in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique
Chiquetaille,

 

Carmelite Martial, when asked what her favorite saltfish dish was, replied, “Well, since I don't really like saltfish, maybe a little feroce. I like avocados.”

TE CONOZCO, BACALAO
AUNQUE VENGAS DESFRAZAO
(I would know you, salt cod
Even if you were wearing a disguise)

—Cuban proverb

Since at least the time of Taillevent, salt cod has always been embellished with richness because it is harsh. Butter, olive oil, cream have been used—Icelanders pour the rendered fat of lamb kidneys over it. In 1654, Louis de Bechamel, marquis de Nointel, financier in the court of Louis XIV, having invested huge sums in the Newfoundland fishery, and finding the market weak in France because Frenchmen did not like this dried and salted old fish, invented a sauce for it, which is now called bechamel sauce. The. sauce enjoyed tremendous popularity with salt cod and many other dishes. Originally it was a simple cream sauce with spices such as nutmeg. Later it was enriched with eggs: