In April 2023, I was blessed to take a deep dive into the history, geography, geology and culture of the far northeast corner of America, the Canadian Maritimes and the St. Lawrence River and Seaway. Con su permisio, as they say in Spanish, I would like to share with you some of what I learned in these blog posts over the next couple of months. Hope you benefit and enjoy!
Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, has a 400-year history of cod fishing. Today, cod is important for fish-and-chips on both sides of the Atlantic. "Yesterday" these fish could weigh up to 200 pounds and now they're usually four-to-five pounds (so explained the guide).
"Yesterday" there were literally millions of these fish in the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In 1497, John Cabot's sailors wrote home to Italy that there "were to may fish we could take them up by the baskets full." Another English report: "We could hardly row a boat between them." Jacque Cartier in 1524 echoed those sentiments and soon the word spread all over Europe, especially to Catholic countries.
Good Catholics in those days did not eat meat on Fridays or on the many special holy days, but they could eat fish. The fishing frenzy was on.
Besides being so abundant, cod live in shallow waters, near the bottom, and are easily fished from small dories with hand-held lines. It was easy to make a living as a cod fisherman. Cod are not an oily fish, so they would dry easily. Salted and spread upon the rocks to dry, salted cod would keep up to two years and fueled many long voyages.
People of that day felt surely that the supply was inexhaustible. But as the technology for catching and processing cod improved, the supply was nearly exhausted. By 1992, the Canadian had closed down cod fishing (except for recreation).
Today most of our cod comes from Iceland.
Who remembers fish sticks back in 1958?? They were cod and still are, I believe.
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