In the latest episode of Gastropodcast, co-hosts Nicola Twilley and Cynthia Graber explore the history of Britain’s national dish.
For most tourists, a visit to the British Isles isn’t complete without a meal of fried fish and fried potatoes, likely eaten off faux newsprint and — if you do it the traditional way — drizzled with malt vinegar. But while fish and chips hasn’t changed much across the U.K. for generations, over the last century, one major thing has: which fish ends up in the fryer.
The early European explorers sent over here, whether to find a new spice route or new land, described these waters as so teeming with fish as to be able to walk upon their backs. Which is a little bit over the top. You know, those were entrepreneurs, and they wanted to get more funding for more voyages. But the truth of the matter is actually kind of close to what their hyperbole was saying. Cod were so plentiful here as to be really the dominantIt was so prevalent in the waters that Cape St.
Culinarily, how did people cook with this salt cod? You can’t just break up a piece and eat it, or can you? This step also lent some great culinary ideas. In one of the most compelling ones I’ve found, in early American cookery, you took your crockpot, you put it over the fire, and you put a bunch of water in there and a bunch of molasses and your salt cod, and you just let it simmer for a day. That makes this sweet, salty, smokey stew from the fire. Like, man, that sounds really good, right?
Cod was really one of the very first stepping stones which the colonies took towards economic and political freedoms, because it began to build wealth. The fishery and that economy was so big, it forced the British to allow American colonists to bypass British merchants in order to sell directly into Mediterranean, Basque, and Spanish markets. All of a sudden the British were not really in control, and didn’t have their foot on the growth of that industry.
The year 1968 is when the cod catch peaked, at about 800,000 metric tons, which is just an egregious amount of fish. And cod stocks began to decline after that. But it wasn’t until the 90s that we really understood that cod were gone, and that fishing effort really ceased entirely. And then populations gradually began to grow back.I support cod fisheries now. They are technically overfished, meaning they are not at their historical levels, where they should be.
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