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Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky Quotes

Journalist

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Famous Mark Kurlansky Quotes

“When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.”

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Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland and earthless Scotland? How did they have enough provisions to push on to Woodland and Vineland, where they dared not go inland to gather food, and yet they still had enough food to get back? What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 985 and 1011 that have been recorded in Icelandic sagas? There were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank.”

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Book:Summary & Study Guide Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
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“The word cod is of unknown origin. For something that began as food for good Catholics on the days they were to abstain from sex, it is not clear why, in several languages, the words for salt cod have come to have sexual connotations. In the English-speaking West Indies, saltfish is the common name for salt cod. In slang, saltfish means "a woman's genitals", and while Caribbeans do love their salt cod, it is this other meaning that is responsible for the frequent appearance of the word saltfish in Caribbean songs such as the Mighty Sparrow's "Saltfish".”

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Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“By the time the war ended, Iceland was a changed country. Not least among the changes, in 1944 it had negotiated full independence from Denmark. Now it was free to negotiate its own relations with the rest of the world. Because of cod, it had moved in one generation from a fifteenth-century colonial society to a modern postwar nation.”

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Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“The town of Lunenburg was built on a hill running down to a sheltered harbour. On one of the upper streets stands a Presbyterian church with a huge gilded cod on its weather vane. Along the waterfront, the wooden-shingled houses are brick red, a color that originally came from mixing clay with cod-liver oil to protect the wood against the salt of the waterfront. It is the look of Nova Scotia - brick red wood, dark green pine, charcoal sea.”

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Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“Typical of Iberia, both the Basques and the Catalans claim the word comes from their own languages, and the rest of Spain disagrees. Catalans have a myth that cod was the proud king of fish and was always speaking boastfully, which was an offence to God. "Va callar!" (Will you be quiet!), God told the cod in Catalan. Whatever the word's origin, in Spain lo que corta el bacalao, the person who cuts the salt cod, is a colloquialism for the person in charge.”

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Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“By 1937, every British trawler had a wireless, electricity, and an echometer - the forerunner of sonar. If getting into fishing had required the kind of capital in past centuries that it cost in the twentieth century, cod would never have built a nation of middle-class, self-made entrepreneurs in New England.”

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Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“Newlyn does not look like the Cornish towns on either side: Penzance and Mousehole. Those are resort towns where British vacationers practice that peculiarly British pastime of strolling the beaches and walkways, bundled in sweaters and mufflers. But Newlyn is a fishing town - or, increasingly, an out-of-work fishing town.”

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Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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