Quotes from Mark Kurlansky

In eighteenth-century England, anchovy sauce became known as ketchup, katchup, or catsup.

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.

Unique to Sichuan, ma is the spicy flavor of a wild tree peppercorn called huajiao—with a taste between peppercorn, caraway, and clove, but so strong that too much will numb the mouth. Two varieties grow in Sichuan, clay red peppercorns and the more perfumey brown ones. La means "hot spice" and is accomplished with small burning red peppers. The combined seasoning, ma-la, defines the taste of Sichuan food.

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.

Theoretically, pickling can be accomplished without salt, but the carbohydrates and proteins in the vegetables tend to putrefy too quickly to be saved by the emerging lactic acid. Without salt, yeast forms, and the fermentation process leads to alcohol rather than pickles.

One result of the tea boycott was that Americans very quickly became coffee drinkers.

ONE GROUP OF Vikings remained in Iceland, becoming the Icelanders. A second group remained in the Faroe Islands. The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans. Soon the Vikings had vanished.

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.

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.

At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

Massachusetts had elevated cod from commodity to fetish.

It is always easier to promote war than peace, easier to end the peace than end the war, because peace is fragile and war is durable.

gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops.

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is the natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural 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.

Politics and nationalism often play far greater roles than conservation in the decision-making process.

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.

There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks?

At about this time the Asiatic wolf, a fierce predator that despite its small size would eat a human if it had the opportunity, came under human control because its friendly young cubs could be fed and trained. A dangerous adversary was turned into a dedicated helper—the dog.

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.

Europeans started wearing linen underwear instead of wool. There is no record indicating that this made the Europeans less irritable, but it did make a lot more rags available.

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.

Where there are Norwegian communities, there are cod clubs.

General Motors, ITT, and Ford come most readily to mind as having plants protected by Hitler