Almighty cod: Why the true king of fish is back on the menu

It is a glorious July day in 1999 and I am out fishing off the eastern shore of Harris with Alasdair Dan. Skye shimmers through the haze, the Minch sparkles, the tide is on the flood, and they are coming in on every cast – saithe and lythe, mackerel, occasionally a cuckoo wrasse in its gorgeous array.

then there is a sudden cry – ‘Ya beauty!’ – and Alasdair springs to his feet. Seconds later, a whiskered fish as long as his arm, of deep belly and lugubrious countenance, flops angrily on the boards.

‘It’s a cod…’ my skipper exults. And though later on we meander through Scadabay township, calling on assorted widows and pensioners with donations from our prodigious haul, that mighty cod he keeps for himself.

Cod has not the glamour of salmon, the elan of the silver herring or the prized roe of the sturgeon. Yet, for centuries, it has been one of the most important food resources on the planet.

It grows quickly, can attain large size and swam the ocean in seemingly inexhaustible abundance. Nutritious and meaty, falling off the bone in rich white flakes, it can stand up to wild cooking and big flavours.

I like to fling it in the oven with cream and lemon juice and dill, but it is delicious devoured, deep-fried, outside your local chippie. It also cures very well.

SALt cod is a traditional Christmas Eve meal in France but, on a greater scale, the pursuit of cod – for salting away – has expanded empires and bent history. ‘Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been triggered by it, national diets have been based on it, economies and livelihoods have depended on it,’ pants Mark Kurlansky in his splendid book, Cod – A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. ‘to the millions it has sustained, it has been a treasure more precious than gold…’

It was cod, he argues, which drew the first Europeans to North America, cod which built and long sustained economies from Canada to New England to our north-eastern ports.

And it has long been so dear to British hearts that, at the insistence of Winston Churchill himself and even in the darkest years of the war, fish and chips were never rationed.

Wars have been waged over cod – the older among us can recall our tussles with Iceland four decades ago.

And, like the passenger pigeon or the North American bison, it seemed there would be no end of cod – until, rather suddenly and off coasts once celebrated for it, it started to disappear. In many Atlantic areas, now, cod of commercial size are extinct. Governments either side of the ocean have had to ban, or restrict, or regulate, as furious fishing communities sought to blame everyone but themselves.

In Britain we eat 70,000 tons of cod each year and in the 1970s stock in the North Sea was measured at a peak of 270,000 tons. By 2000, though, there was growing alarm, reaching high panic in 2006 as all the cod in the North Sea fell to a mere 36,000 tons.

the European Union and the authorities had no choice but to intervene and the Scottish fishing industry, scientists and the Scottish Government bent their heads together to agree on a recovery plan.

Conservation methods were agreed and enforced. Boats were allocated so many restricted days when they could fish and, the more they conformed to the new rules and principles, the more days they were allowed. Much tighter rules about nets were decided – and enforced – and trawling was forbidden in parts of the North Sea known as cod spawning grounds.

Given fishing areas, too, could be closed at short notice if the local cod population was evidently in trouble. Such things were neither popular or palatable, but essential after decades of gross overfishing.

Just over a decade later, the programme has worked, and yesterday the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) announced that North Sea cod is now sustainable and can be eaten with a ‘clear conscience’.

It can now be sold with its prized blue-tick label declaring it to be ‘sustainable and fully traceable’ and this milestone, says the MSC, is a ‘monumental achievement’ for the industry – the result of a tight coalition of fishing organisations, supermarkets, seafood brands and the industry body Seafish.

Yes, Cap’n Birdseye, even you. ‘thanks to a collaborative, cross-industry effort, one of our most iconic fish has been brought back from the brink,’ enthuses toby Middleton, MSC programme director for the north-east Atlantic.

the World Wide Fund for Nature, though, points out that by historic standards cod stocks remain unnervingly low.

THE amount of North Sea cod at breeding age is well below late 1960s levels and recovery remains fragile,’ says Lyndsey Dodds. ‘If we are to get North Sea cod back on British plates for good, it’s vital we don’t lose focus on sustainably managing fish stocks and ensuring the protection of the marine wildlife and habitats as the UK develops its post-Brexit fisheries policy.’

Her caution is understandable precisely because this success story is so unusual.

As a senior figure in the Western Isles industry cracked to me many years ago: ‘You never met a fisherman with foresight and you never will.’

We have a painful demonstration of it in the disappearance of our celebrated herring, fished to near-extinction by the late Seventies and whose numbers have never recovered. though reporters tend to focus on bans, quotas and offshore limits, the real problem has never been quotas: it has been methods of fishing.

Herring, historically, were caught off the West Highlands in drift nets, their mesh of carefully calculated size so that only adult herring were taken. But by the 1930s there was heavy predation by vast trawlers from ports such as Grimsby, Fleetwood and Hull, using much more ruthless ring nets.

And by 1970 the ring netters were being put out of business by the still more irresponsible purse netters… until, suddenly, there were no more herring.

there are other parallels. You should only ever buy scallops, for instance, caught by hand by divers; a few weeks ago we saw appalling video footage of the scarred and mangled sea bed of Loch Carron, full of smashed and dying things after a bit of scallop dredging – another instance of our warped old Scottish fishing ways, with all the logic of a cider maker harvesting his apples by chopping down the trees.

the recovery of Scotland’s cod has called for selfdiscipline, cold reason, a belated environmental conscience and, for hundreds of our fishermen, real sacrifice.

It is a story with no losers, indeed a stunning achievement – and with a happy ending.

You can email John MacLeod at john.macleod@dailymail.co.uk