ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Time and Temperature and Salt: Caribbean Codscapes in Three Acts

• In Event: Contested Fishscapes: Fisheries, Science, and Development in the Twentieth Century

English Abstract

Planks of protein, dried and salted codfish fueled centuries of trade and how European appetites remapped Atlantic waters with the forced migration of people and plants and worlds. Newfoundland—Britain’s oldest colony and Canada’s youngest province—was built by cod, a foundation that fell apart at the end of the twentieth century as marked by the collapse of its nearly five-hundred year old fishery and the 1992 Moratorium. But decades earlier, due to the commercialization of flash-freezing and the development of the industrial cold-chain, technologies of temperature already dethroned the dominance of salt and time in preserving fish. And yet in the Caribbean, where turquoise coasts are thick in calories from the likes of red snapper and mackerel and grouper, cod is still a throughline running through many of its cuisines. Here, to say cod is to mean salt fish and not fillets that have been frozen so fast that they still count as fresh. The question, then, is obvious: Why? And how? Surveying culinary and colonial contradictions, this paper highlights the ways that recipes record how fishery science and government regulations entangle with tables and tongues.

Author

• L. Sasha Gora, University of Augsburg