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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
To make the history of a fish interesting, invigorating and moving is an almost impossible feat that Mark Kurlansky accomplishes fantastically well in this compact, learned, beautifully written gem of a book. Cod traces humankind's involvement with what was once one of the world's most plentiful foodstuffs. The Basque people, who Kurlansky suggests found America before Columbus, could only fish and forage (for whale meat) as far as they did because of the huge schools of cod they found, caught and salted as they went. Centuries before this Vikings had travelled from Norway across to Canada--the exact range of the Atlantic cod. Interspersed with old and forgotten recipes Cod becomes a fitting requiem to a fish no-one believed would ever become scarce nor become such a telling metaphor for our careless treatment of the sea, its bounty and our wider environment. --Mark Thwaite
Review
The next time you have fish and chips, spare a thought for the poor cod. This aquatic perennial had been a staple of the human diet for millennia before it first became popular to deep-fry it in batter with slices of potato in the 1830s. Places have been named after the cod and whole economies supported by it; it has ignited revolutions and wars have been fought in its name. By taking this unlikely hero and telling its story from all corners of the globe over many centuries, Kurlansky provides a highly entertaining narrative. (Kirkus UK)
Cod - that whitest of the white-fleshed fish, prize of every fish-and-chips establishment - gets expert, loving, and encyclopedic handling from Food and Wine columnist Kurlansky (A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry, 1994, etc.). There was one very good reason that tenth-century Vikings made it to the New World: Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Canada, they followed the exact range of the Atlantic cod. When explorers pushed off European shores in search of Eldorado, others made straight for the cod fisheries of the North Atlantic; the codfishers got by far the better results. Writing with a bright, crisp, journalistic flair, Kurlansky situates the cod in all its historic glory: the mysteries of the early Ba
To make the history of a fish interesting, invigorating and moving is an almost impossible feat that Mark Kurlansky accomplishes fantastically well in this compact, learned, beautifully written gem of a book. Cod traces humankind's involvement with what was once one of the world's most plentiful foodstuffs. The Basque people, who Kurlansky suggests found America before Columbus, could only fish and forage (for whale meat) as far as they did because of the huge schools of cod they found, caught and salted as they went. Centuries before this Vikings had travelled from Norway across to Canada--the exact range of the Atlantic cod. Interspersed with old and forgotten recipes Cod becomes a fitting requiem to a fish no-one believed would ever become scarce nor become such a telling metaphor for our careless treatment of the sea, its bounty and our wider environment. --Mark Thwaite
Review
The next time you have fish and chips, spare a thought for the poor cod. This aquatic perennial had been a staple of the human diet for millennia before it first became popular to deep-fry it in batter with slices of potato in the 1830s. Places have been named after the cod and whole economies supported by it; it has ignited revolutions and wars have been fought in its name. By taking this unlikely hero and telling its story from all corners of the globe over many centuries, Kurlansky provides a highly entertaining narrative. (Kirkus UK)
Cod - that whitest of the white-fleshed fish, prize of every fish-and-chips establishment - gets expert, loving, and encyclopedic handling from Food and Wine columnist Kurlansky (A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry, 1994, etc.). There was one very good reason that tenth-century Vikings made it to the New World: Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Canada, they followed the exact range of the Atlantic cod. When explorers pushed off European shores in search of Eldorado, others made straight for the cod fisheries of the North Atlantic; the codfishers got by far the better results. Writing with a bright, crisp, journalistic flair, Kurlansky situates the cod in all its historic glory: the mysteries of the early Ba