Salt cod: one fish, three histories

Before tins and fridges, salt was how fish crossed an ocean. Cod, split, salted and dried hard, was traded all round the Atlantic, and it went to very different tables for very different reasons. Three of them still cook it, and each dish carries its own history.

Why it keeps

Dried salt cod, klippfisk in Norway, is about 20 per cent salt, which is far too much to eat. It has to be soaked down to 2 to 3 per cent before it is food. Norwegian researchers at Nofima found commercial salt cod keeps for at least two years at 4°C or below. In heat it is a different story: at 30°C, the figure they could stand behind dropped to 17 days.

That is worth knowing now. Salt cod is a long-life food in a cold store, not in a warm cupboard, and the soaking has to happen in the fridge, because researchers found that desalting above 10°C spoils it.

Newfoundland: the fishermen’s breakfast

The Canadian Encyclopedia describes how cod drove British colonisation after John Cabot’s arrival in 1497, and remained the island’s economic foundation until the stocks collapsed in the early 1990s.

What the fishermen ate themselves had to survive weeks at sea, and fish and brewis is the result: salt cod, hard bread softened in water, and salt pork fried crisp into scrunchions. It is still cooked, and still counted the classic dish of the outports, the small coastal communities, second only to Jiggs dinner.

Cook it: fish and brewis, with the hard bread from our ship’s biscuit recipe.

The Caribbean: a cheap ration for enslaved people

The same trade had a darker market. Plantation owners in the Caribbean did not want to give land over to growing food, the National Museum of Bermuda explains, so they turned to cod: dried hard enough to survive the heat, high in protein, and cheap. Bermudian ships carried salt north and came back south with dried fish for that market.

In Jamaica, the Government’s own heritage history records that plantation owners were required by law to supply salted meat or fish, and expected enslaved people to grow the rest of their food themselves. The ackee tree is believed to have come with enslaved West Africans, and was grown in Jamaica by 1798. Out of a salt ration and a West African fruit came the dish Jamaica now calls its national dish, ackee and saltfish.

It is worth sitting with that for a moment. A food that was issued to people as the cheapest way to keep them working became, in their hands and their descendants’, a dish of pride.

Why there is no ackee recipe here yet. Ackee is a safety question as well as a culinary one. The US Food and Drug Administration warns that unripe fruit, and the rind and seeds of ripe fruit, are never safe to eat, because of a natural toxin, hypoglycin A, and that badly processed ackee can still be dangerous. In the UK it is usually sold in tins. We will publish ackee and saltfish once we have written a properly sourced safety page to go with it, not before.

Portugal: the faithful friend

Portugal calls salt cod, bacalhau, its faithful friend, and Lisbon’s tourist board puts the country’s share at about a fifth of the world’s cod catch. Much of the reason is twentieth-century politics.

In 1934 the Estado Novo dictatorship launched what it called the cod campaign, to make salt cod a staple and, in the words of Lisbon’s tourist board, to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign supply. The state took over the organisation of the fishery, from the fleet to the recruitment of crews. The historian Álvaro Garrido has written about what that meant for the men sent to fish off Newfoundland and Greenland: in the spring of 1937 they revolted, in a protest that mixed sabotage with the features of a strike.

The ships themselves became famous as the White Fleet. Lisbon’s tourist board says their hulls were painted white to mark Portugal’s neutrality during the Second World War; other accounts give other reasons, and we have not found a source that settles it. The last Portuguese cod fleet sailed for Newfoundland in 1974, the year the dictatorship fell.

The habit outlived the campaign. Boiled salt cod with potatoes, cabbage, chickpeas and eggs is still the centre of Christmas Eve dinner in Portugal. Those sides are fresh food, which is why we have not adapted it here.

The same fish, three reasons

Newfoundland ate salt cod because it was what the fishermen had at sea. The Caribbean ate it because plantation owners chose it as the cheapest ration. Portugal ate it because a government decided it should. In all three it became something people cook with pride, and in all three the history is still present at the table.

For more dishes born of scarcity, see how scarcity made dishes people love.