Cod - Mark Kurlansky

"A charming fish tale and a pretty gift for your favorite seafood cook or fishing monomaniac. But in the last analysis, it's a bitter ecological fable for our time."-Los Angeles Times

An unexpected, energetic look at world history via the humble cod fish from the
bestselling author of Salt and The Basque History of the
World

Cod is the
biography of a single species of fish, but it may as well be a world history
with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod, it turns out, is the
reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic,
and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland
and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic
sagas? Cod, frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and
eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold
salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply
of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history, we also find a
delicious legacy of recipes, and the tragic story of environmental failure, of
depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely,
thoughtful history, Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that
changed the world forever changed by the world's
folly?

"Every once in a while a
writer of particular skill takes a fresh, seemingly improbable idea and turns
out a book of pure delight. Such is the case of Mark Kurlansky and the codfish."
-David McCullough