The Sacred Cod

Suspended over the public gallery in the Massachusetts House of Representatives is the Sacred Cod —a wooden fish  nearly five feet long, its sleek frame held taut by two guy wires strung fore and aft. Carved from a solid piece of white pine, it has graced both the Old State House and the New for more than 200 years. This piece of folk art hangs as a silent reminder of the importance of cod to the world, to New Englanders, and to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Many of us think cod quite pedestrian, probably because it had always been there in plenitude, easy for the taking. We forget the delicacy of its firm, pristine white flesh, its flaky texture, its astonishing ability to adjust, chameleon-like, to all methods of preparation from baking, broiling: and poaching to sautéing and deep-frying. Americans, in fact, have come only recently to appreciate cod, although it has been a prominent presence since pre-Colonial times. In 1497 John Cabot, searching for the fabled route to the East, came back instead with tales of a sea south of Newfoundland so packed with fish that they could be caught merely by dropping a weighted basket into the water and hoisting it up. Somewhat later a Spanish explorer, Estaban Gomez, dubbed America ” the Codfish Continent,” and in 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, venturing south along the New England coast in search of sassafras, named a great peninsula of land “Cape Cod” for the multitudes of fish he found there. French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese fishermen – perhaps even the Vikings – had been fishing the Grand Banks for years. The voyage from Europe to the Grand Banks was not made in days or weeks, so they were forced to camp on the craggy New England and Canadian coasts, where they built fishing stations. The length of the trip home created a sizable problem of logistics. In those pre-refrigeration days, the catch, accrued over the spring, summer, and early fall, would spoil. The solution was to dry and salt the fish for reconstitution later. Thus bacalao, or salt cod, was born, and it became as basic to the world’s diet as beef was to ours in pre-cholesterol days. Excerpt from “’All Hail the Sacred Cod,” Yankee Magazine, August 1994.