Cod (28 page)

ON CHOOSING A FRESH COD: “THE HEAD SHOULD BE
LARGE; TAIL SMALL; SHOULDERS THICK; LIVER,
CREAMY WHITE; AND THE SKIN CLEAR AND SILVERY
WITH A BRONZE LIKE SHEEN.”

—British Admiralty,
Manual
of Naval Cookery, 1921

Only people who have lived by the North Atlantic understand the quality of fresh cod. It does not even resemble, except maybe in color, a fresh frozen cod. Fresh cod will inconveniently fall apart in cooking, which was why Sam Lee's New Orleans customer did not like his shipment. If it does not flake, it is not fresh. Fresh cod is “white, delicate, resilient,” according to Paris chef Alain Senderens. “It will not tolerate long cooking. If you cook it carefully, cod will flake and give off milky cooking juices.”

People who know fresh cod—from the great restaurants of France, to British working-class fish shops, to the St. John's waterfront—all agree on three things: It should be cooked quickly and gently, it should be prepared simply, and, above all, it must be a thick piece. Only a large piece can be properly cooked. The Lyons region's celebrated Paul Bocuse begins a simple recipe for fresh cod with potatoes and onions: “Use a piece of cod about 30 centimeters long cut from the center of the fish.” The center of the fish is the thickest part. Bocuse is talking about the choice center of a three-foot cod, which is what everyone who knows fresh cod wants. But it is getting hard to find.

 

 

Alexandre Dumas gave these tips on selecting cod: “Choose a handsome spotted cod from Ostende or the Channel.... the best have white skin and yellow spots.” He also offered the following recipe:

Wherever there are Norwegian communities, there are cod clubs. There is one in New York and four in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The clubs are usually exclusively for men. According to Bjarne Grindem, the former Norwegian consul in Minneapolis, three of the four in the Twin Cities are all men, and the fourth is “more liberal.” Although cod clubs claim to be exclusive and applicants wait for years for a place, each club has as many as 200 members. One hundred or more men get together once a month at lunchtime, and the meal is always boiled cod and potatoes with melted butter served with aquavit and flat bread, called kavli. “Whether they get together to get together or get together to eat cod is another question, but they always get together around the cod,” said Grindem. The oldest, most exclusive of the Twin City clubs is the Norwegian Codfish Club at the Interlochen country club in Edina. While the members gave lectures on the exact way to prepare a boiled cod, never letting the water actually boil, the kitchen at the Interlochen was more prosaic: “You mix salt water and bring to a boil and put the fish in and cover and cook for half an hour. It's a good thick fish, about a pound a person.”

Stella's is a popular, cozy little restaurant on the St. John's waterfront. Miraculously, one day the restaurant was able to buy enough large, thick, cod fillets from the Sentinel Fishery to put this old standard back on the menu for one night—just a teaser, reminding Newfoundlanders of what they were missing. Stella's defies Newfoundland tradition and refuses to use pork fat, understandably regarding it as unhealthy.

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