Cod Quotes

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The art of taxation consists of plucking the goose so as to obtain the most feathers with the least hissing.”
― Jean-Baptiste Colbert

“Nature remains focused on survival.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Just another day at the office.”
― Captain Price

“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.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Cod meat has virtually no fat (.3 percent) and is more than 18 percent protein, which is unusually high even for fish. And when cod is dried, the more than 80 percent of its flesh that is water having evaporated, it becomes concentrated protein - almost 80 percent protein.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“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.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“The technology never reverses itself. It creates new technology to confront new sets of problems.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Nature may have even less patience than politicians.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Newfoundlanders debated over when "the cod was coming back". Few dared ask if. Or what happens to the ocean if they don't come back?”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“I gained a sense of why Grieg was so touched by the wistful, elegiac folk music of Norway, and what he meant when he said self-effacingly that his music had a 'taste of cod' about it.”
― Anthony Tommasini, The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide

“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.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Summary & Study Guide Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

“Cod became almost a religious icon - a mythological crusader for Christian observance.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“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".”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“In Middle English, cod meant "a bag or a sack", or by inference, "a scrotum", which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“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.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Massachusetts had elevated cod from commodity to fetish.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Since the industrial revolution, Great Britain had been developing an ever-increasing market for groundfish - especially cod, haddock, and plaice - because fried fish, later fish-and-chips, became the favorite dish of the urban working class.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“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.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Salt cod, morue, had slowly made its way up from peasant food in the south to become an honored French tradition. But not fresh cod.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Politics and nationalism often play far greater roles than conservation in the decision-making process.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“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.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“The most highly developed salt cod cuisine in the world is that of the Spanish Basque provinces. Until the nineteenth century, salt cod was exclusively food for the poor, usually broken up in stews.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“People who know fresh cod - from the great restaurants of France, to British working-class fish shops, to the St. John's waterfront - all agree on three things: It should be cooked quickly and gently, it should be prepared simply, and, above all, it must be a thick piece. Only a large piece can be properly cooked.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Where there are Norwegian communities, there are cod clubs.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Eels from the Tiber are a traditional Roman delicacy, pan-cooked with soft onions, garlic, chiles, tomatoes, and white wine, but a much more common dish is baccalà, preserved salt-cured cod, which is fried in thin strips, then simmered in a tomato sauce flavored with anchovies, pine nuts, and raisins. For really good fresh fish, you are better off heading either up or down the coast, toward Civitavecchia to the north or Gaeta to the south.”
― Anthony Capella, The Food of Love

“E.K.I.A, Enemy Killed In Action”
― COD bot

“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.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“How much above zero still produces zero is not known.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World