Hi there, and welcome back to another strong edition of The Cipher.
-Lauren |
The WNBA’s Season Of Clash Is Big Business For The Permanently Aggrieved
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Well Well Well, Not So Bad To Have A First-Round Bye Now, Is It
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What Fantasy Football Means To Incarcerated Managers
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One Thing We Liked On The Internet Today:
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Book recommendations can be hit or miss, but when a man I met last weekend said I might like Mark Kurlansky’s book Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, I knew instantly that I would. I love all fish equally, but I’ve been thinking a great deal about cod because of my weekly fish share in NYC, which often nets me pollock, haddock, and hake—all members of the cod family—but never cod itself, which has been famously, historically overfished.
Kurlansky’s book is a swift but exhaustive ode to cod, traversing more than a thousand years through our fraught relationship with the fish. Before I started the book, I wondered, how could one fish possibly change the world? Kurlansky answers this question almost immediately: When the Vikings and medieval Basques learned how to salt cod, they gained access to a nutritious food that would not spoil on long voyages at sea, making it possible for them to sail across the Atlantic. People were salting other foods, such as ham, herring, and whale, but cod has virtually no fat, so salt cod outlasted the fattier hams, the herrings, and whale meats. You only needed to properly soak it to make a delicious, flaky meal. By 1550, cod represented 60 percent of all the fish eaten in Europe, a superlative that would last several centuries. (Suck it, anchovy!)
Much of the book so far—I haven’t finished it—recounts the classic story of people finding a resource and proceeding to do everything in their power to obliterate it and ensure no other people in the future will ever have a chance to taste the snowy white flesh of fresh cod. There is lots of greed and rapaciousness in this book, as well as a nice explanation of how cod spend their days (kind of drifting by the seafloor eating whatever they can fit in their mouths.) There is also a nice array of cod-related drama, such as how the Basques tried keeping the source of their cod secret for centuries or how the first man who voyaged with cod would just not stop murdering people.
My favorite element of the book is the recipes Kurlansky describes. Some are weird and medieval, and others so simple they are barely recipes at all. Listening to the book made me hungry. Luckily, I had cod’s cousin, pollock, in my fish share this week, caught from Gloucester, Mass. I spent a wonderful evening making my favorite fish stew while listening to the narrator of Kurlansky’s book impersonate various fishermen. The stew I made is called a bullinada, and I used the NYT Cooking recipe, but this free recipe looks basically the same. That recipe describes it as having a “mysterious delicate flavor,” which I would dismiss as a load of hooey if I hadn’t made this stew basically once a month. The mystery comes from an onion, some garlic, saffron threads, potatoes, fennel seeds, orange peel, lemon, mayo, and chili pepper. When I log off today, I’m having leftovers!
-Sabrina Imbler |
A Round Of Shots From The MLB Playoffs |
Credits (all via Getty Images): Alex Slitz (first three), John Fisher, Greg Fiume, Sean M. Haffey, Patrick Smith |
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