Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
You won’t find a street corner in suburban Pittsburgh without a “Fish Fry” sign from Ash Wednesday to Good Friday. It’s a tradition in the Steel City and in just about every other major city with a sizeable Roman Catholic population.
There are a lot of Catholic churches in the greater Pittsburgh area. There is an entire Catholic High School athletic league in Washington, Allegheny, Westmoreland, Armstrong, Green, Beaver, Fayette, Indiana, Lawrence, and Butler Counties.
There are just about as many Catholics per square mile as you’d find Mormons in Salt Lake, Afton, or Cokeville.
It’s not a theocracy, but it could be easily.
Those fish fry signs hide a bigger seasonal event. They fund volunteer fire departments, churches, civic groups, and private schools.
The Rainbow Fire Department in White Oak, Pennsylvania, generates its entire annual budget selling fried cod, coleslaw, fries, fried mushrooms, onion rings, pierogies, and haluska.
It’s a tasty, greasy way to protect the community. It’s the traditional American way. The idea of fish on Friday comes from a past far removed from the creation of the United States.
Prior to the late Medieval period, Friday was just another day of the week on the menu.
Only the wealthy ate beef. There was no easy way to preserve it aside from jerky and an awful English concoction called “bully beef.” The vast amount of meat from a steer couldn’t be eaten by a family before it spoiled.
Pork, chicken, and finally fish were another issue. Pork was smoked and salted. The poor lived on bacon, ham, and smoked shoulder. People along the coasts and living beside major rivers ate locally-caught fish.
In southern Europe, salami, prosciutto, and smoked sausage were the preferred way to preserve pork. For generations, the mother of the house would walk outside, snag some poor chicken, wring its neck, and fresh chicken was on the evening dinner menu.
Fish were something new in the late Middle Ages for much of Europe.
A handful of people ate freshwater fish. The French loved eels, caught in traps along the Atlantic, but the widespread consumption of cod, salmon, sea bass, tuna, and swordfish was unheard of 25 miles inland.
Unheard of until the middle 15th century.
French, Italian, and Basque fishermen began sailing farther and farther into the Atlantic. They learned through legends brought down from the days of Leif Ericson and other Norsemen of vast schools of easily netted fish off the coast of modern Newfoundland.
They caught hulls full of cod and brought them back to sell, but they didn’t preserve well, and many loads were ruined by spoiled, putrefied fish. Imagine the reaction when a vessel hit the harbor with a tailwind and a hold of 10 tons of rotting cod. Aromatic to say the least.
The solution came in salting each layer of fish as it was caught. Salt was an easy-to-obtain commodity throughout Europe by 1440, when the fishing fleets first crossed the North Atlantic.
You started with a load of salt and gradually replaced it with fish. The solution was so easy that fleets began to form.
Fish prices dropped. People still preferred pork and chicken. Something needed to be done to increase demand.
That something came with Catholic church politics. Fishermen, that is, professional fishing fleet owners, had a word with their local bishop. The cardinals took notice, and before long, it was fish on Friday year-round. Previously, it was common to give up meat on Fridays during Lent, but now it was 52 Fridays a year.
The practice proved to be lucrative for the fishing fleets and the Catholic Church. Money changed hands, and the process changed from an idea to a tradition.
It’s far from the first time religion affected the diet of a large group of people.
When the “Great Exchange” began after Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in the late 15th century, potatoes, tomatoes and tobacco poured into the Old World from the Americas.
Tobacco was instantly popular, and smoke billowed out of the homes of the wealthy. It sprang an entire slave-based economy in the Southern Colonies.
Tomatoes and potatoes were harder to sell. Tomatoes were correctly identified as a member of the nightshade family and feared to be poisonous. Nightshade was the poison of choice for generations in Europe. It took a bit of subterfuge by nobles to get the common man to eat tomatoes.
Imagine Italian food without tomatoes. Pizza, spaghetti, ravioli, lasagna; all of them would be vastly different without the red stuff.
Potatoes were considered the work of the devil.
With bread, a farmer had to plow, till, and plant seeds. The weather had to be ideal for it to grow. Wheat, oats, barley, and rye all grew from the ground towards the heavens. It didn’t take a big leap for priests and ministers to make the connection between God and man. Grain grew from the earth and was harvested as it reached towards the heavens. An obvious connection to the ascent of man, eventually to heaven.
Not so for the potato. You cut a potato into chunks, put it in the ground, and came back in three or four months to harvest a crop that was 30 to 50 times the amount that was planted.
Potatoes were the devil’s work. They didn’t require labor, which was blasphemous. They grew in the ground, away from view.
Mostly, they allowed peasants to be independent from the local gentry. Food was easier with potatoes, didn’t require a lot of land, and fed more people per acre than grain ever could.
The powers that be didn’t like people feeding themselves beyond their influence. For a while in what would become Germany and throughout Ireland, Scotland, and England, potato plants were destroyed by the order of the king, prince, duke, or whatever other inbred leader in the local castle decreed.
Cod, tomatoes, and potatoes.
They’re all integral parts of the modern food distribution network in the world. From Berlin to Beijing, you’ll find the same supplies.
As they said in Dragnet, “only the names were changed to protect the innocent.” The innocent in this case would be the recipes in Trieste as opposed to the same ingredients in Tokyo.
Back to the fish fry season. It’s awesome. The cod is great, the haluski even better, and who can complain when anything is deep fat fried?