A grizzled man in full fishing gear waggled the shiny, dead cod in his hands. We stood in a circle around him, a group of Americans, Canadians, Brazilians, and New Zealanders nervously awaiting the next step in this unique ceremony. Soon, the floppy fish would approach each of our faces, and we’d have to kiss it. All of us had paid $20 for the opportunity.
The cost also covered a cube of Spam, a shot of Screech (rum), and a paper certificate claiming the status of “Honorary Newfoundlander,” issued by the Newfoundland Labrador Liquor Corporation. Mine is hanging in my kitchen (I kissed the cod).
This tourist-aimed process is known as getting “screeched in,” after the potent Newfoundland rum you have to drink during the ceremony. You can get “screeched in” on George Street, which consists of bars stacked atop bars, in downtown St. John’s, Newfoundland’s capital city. I became an honorary Newfoundlander on the second floor of Christian’s, which has been trolling foreigners (or “come from aways,” like the name of the popular Broadway play that takes place in the province) for about 18 years by having them kiss dead cod.
“Have you ever done this?” I remember asking my partner and his two friends, all Newfoundlanders, before I joined the group of “screechers” in summer 2016. They laughed. “Nah, by, of course not.” No self-respecting Newfoundlander would pay money to kiss the type of fish that they’d been eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner their whole lives. But as someone dating a Newfoundlander who’d traveled to the small island off the east coast of Canada for the first time, I had no choice but to get so acquainted with its staple food.
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“Fish is cod in Newfoundland,” said Jeremy Charles, head chef at St. John’s restaurant Raymonds, a member of the Diner’s Club World’s 50 Best Restaurants, on a recent episode of “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.” Although Anthony Bourdain is my pet peeve, I had to watch him experience the cuisine of an island I’d come to love over the past two years (and whose name Bourdain failed to learn to pronounce over the course of his visit — it rhymes with “understand”).
While Bourdain chowed down on gourmet fish and brewis (pronounced “brews”), a salty, hearty meal featuring flaky cod, potatoes, hardtack (bread you have to soak in water overnight before you can bite it), and scrunchions (cubes of pork fat fried in pork fat — indulgence at its best), he skimmed over some of the best parts of the cod. Namely, their tongues and cheeks. Lightly battered and fried in pork fat, both are a delight.
But first, some background on Newfoundland’s fraught history with cod: As early as the 15th Century, Newfoundland’s teeming cod population attracted fishermen from across the globe, including France, Spain, England, and Portugal. You can still trace back certain Newfoundlanders’ family names to fishermen who settled there in the early 17th Century, according to “Fishery to Colony: A Newfoundland Watershed, 1793-1815,” by Shannon Ryan. Cod fishing contributed to a steady increase in Newfoundland’s population over the 19th Century, and by the 20th Century, some 30,000 Newfoundlanders were making a living off cod, even though fleets from abroad harvested the majority each year. Overfishing was inevitable.
The industry still proved extremely profitable for Newfoundlanders in the 1900s, even as the number of fish began to dwindle. In the 1970s, the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries, a management body for extranational fishing, first implemented “catch quotas,” limiting the number of Northern cod fishermen could take home. Fishermen continued to fill those quotas with ease, misleading authorities into believing that hefty catches meant plentiful cod. In reality cod numbers were going down — the fishermen’s technology and gear had just gotten better and allowed them to work more efficiently. “A 1989 internal review revealed DFO [the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans] had overestimated cod populations by as much as 100 percent during the decade leading up to the moratorium,” according to the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website.
The infamous Newfoundland cod fishing moratorium went into effect three years later. The industry closed down “indefinitely,” leaving tens of thousands of hardworking Newfoundlanders without a job and on “pogey” (Canadian slang for unemployment insurance).
The movie “The Grand Seduction” captures the moratorium’s impact on the island’s many small, rural communities well. In it, Brendan Gleeson (“In Bruges,” “The Guard”) plays a Newfoundlander (alongside several actual Newfoundlander actors) in the post-moratorium generation who lives in a 120-person community, where it seems like all 120 locals rely on pogey for a living. They feel deflated compared to their parents’ generation, who worked long hours on the boats and docks and came home satisfied, with full pockets and a sense of purpose. In the movie, this generation’s contentment is exemplified in the collective sigh heard throughout the town as each couple, at the end of the long workday, experiences post-coital bliss.
My partner, Ryan, pale with curly hair and tattoos featuring St. John’s harbor on his leg and an unspecified fish on his arm, grew up closer to the capital city and therefore didn’t quite have “The Grand Seduction” experience. However, his grandfather tangentially benefited from the cod fishing industry in Bay Roberts, where he ran a general store that catered to workers from the nearby fish plant and people who stopped in from passing boats. Ryan ate cod “every other day growing up . . . Anytime Sobeys [a Canadian grocery store chain] had cod on up there for half off a pound, my grandmother would pick it up, throw it down in the freezer, and you’d be eating cod for two weeks.”
His grandmother would prepare the cod by thoroughly boiling it, until it was “flaky and soft and tender but bland as all hell,” a recipe that called for liberal salting. Cod loves salt like meat loves salt, and salt had been employed to preserve the caught fish for centuries, making salt fish a common addition to any meal. To make salt fish palatable, you have to soak it, usually overnight, after which it becomes a delectable component of the aforementioned fish and brewis.
As for cod tongues (and cheeks), the best recipes are simple. Newfoundlanders learned how to perfect them because they come from the least desirable part of a cod—their heads. Since the rest of the world imported Atlantic cod for the abundant meat in their two to three-foot-long bodies, Newfoundlanders were left with a lot of extra heads, deemed worthless by those who didn’t know to cut out the tongues and dig beneath the cheek bones for tender meat.
You can treat cod tongues and cheeks pretty much the same when you’re cooking them. First, mix up some flour, salt, and pepper. You can do this on a kitchen countertop or in a plastic bag sitting atop a pile of snow in the woods. Meanwhile, fry up some cubes of pork fat in pork fat to make scrunchions (a sinfully addictive food item hard to encounter outside of Newfoundland — perhaps fried pancetta is the closest I’ve gotten in the States).
Then it’s time to throw the tongue and cheeks on your frying pan. Keep them there until one side turns golden brown, then flip to achieve the same effect on the other. The resulting meal is one of perfect texture variation, a crisp crunch covering up soft, flavorful meat that comes apart easily in your mouth, topped off with the juicy, salt burst of scrunchions.
“Everyone likes to compare food to chicken,” Ryan told me. “Think of cod tongue as the dark meat of the chicken . . . oily with flavor, it’s full-bodied like chicken legs and thighs.” The comparison is apt. A dynamic muscle, the cod’s tongue is more fibrous than the tender cheeks, but both call to mind the texture of shellfish, more oyster than scallop and the taste is a mild and sweet pleasing fishy made salty through frying.
In spite of their roots as the throwaway parts of the cod, cod tongues have become a delicacy in the eyes of visitors to the island. I had my first fried cod tongue at St. John’s Fish Exchange, the kind of restaurant to which you’d wear a collared shirt, overlooking the city’s harbor. Pan-fried with scrunchions, the cod tongues exemplified a classic, poor man’s recipe gone haute, a once cast-aside organ playing dress-up. I could not complain.
“Cod tongues and other Newfoundland cuisine is a good analogy for what it feels like to be a Newfoundlander now,” Ryan mused, watching flaky salt cod sizzle alongside softened, doughy hard tack, golden brown potatoes, and crackling scrunchions in a pan on our stove. You used to be able to go down to the fishery and pay a dollar a pound to cut the meat out of cods’ heads to fry up at home. Now, you can pay $15 for a few tongues at St. John’s Fish Exchange. “It’s bizarre growing up in a place no one knew existed that is now going through a renaissance of being cool and interesting.”
The U.S. is going through a sort of discovery period with Newfoundland. Besides Bourdain, VICE made a trip to the island with its food show, “Munchies,” and David Letterman reflected on his post-“retirement” trip to Fogo Island, a newly trending vacation spot off Newfoundland’s coast, with Barack Obama on the first episode of the former’s new Netflix show.
All this newfound interest happens to correspond to a resurgence of cod in the region. It’s been 26 years since the moratorium, and the population has been going up by about 30 percent year over year for the last decade, according to Canada’s National Post as of March 2017. The cod population is still nowhere near the size of its heyday, but it is growing — just in time for foreigners to start developing a taste for their tongues.
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The “screeching in” ceremony ends with a call and response. After you’ve had your rum and kissed your cod, the man in the fishing gear will ask you, “Is you a Newfoundlander?”
And, after breathing in a surprisingly pleasant whiff of beer, salt, and fish, you say, “Indeed I is, me old cock, and long may your big jib draw!” (Look it up.) Then, you go and enjoy Newfoundland’s second most popular food group — beer. I’d recommend Black Horse.
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