The Cod and Its Relations

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top 1000North Atlantic Seafood
North Atlantic Seafood

By Alan Davidson

Published 1980

  • About

The Order Gadiformes contains a number of species which are of great importance as food and which are found only in the North Atlantic. Some of the species occur in the Mediterranean; but, viewed collectively, they are a group of cold-water fish. This is certainly true of the cod, haddock and saithe, which are the three principal species.

The cod, for all its popularity, has had a lack-lustre image in England, seeming to typify ‘the ordinary fish’. This is strange. Whether one looks at it with the eyes of a cook or those of a biologist, it is of outstanding interest; and for historians it has even more fascination than the herring.