Measure
While watching a video this morning I came across a new word: quintal. A unit of measure no longer ordinarily found that was common when people were salting fish. I have only one memory of salt fish. Many years ago a coworker gave me a gift more to test if I was too stupid to know what to do with it. This offering came with instructions. Soak, rinse, repeat period. After that I was on my own. I understood what I had in hand, salt cod, and with potatoes, I was able to prepare a meal and then the next day report that it had been very good. Anyhow, the video I watched today was of an old fisherman who talked about the days when he would quote in his story fish by hand line all day and then come back and spend the night in the hold of the ship splitting his catch and salting it. This would go on for days. Turns out that there’s not much salt fish around anymore and if you did have a quintal you could sell it easily. In boutique shops. A delicacy for many. I think I’ll stick with my current diet. Apparently too much salt is bad for you. The idea of spending all night cutting fish and storing it to be dried seems like more work than any of us want to do now. But, we now have refrigerators. As someone else might say count your blessings. I’ve only seen cod drying on the flakes one time. Not around here. We used to catch enough fish like that to do a meal or two but no large productions. We left that to folks in other provinces. We had potatoes and they needed our food as much as we needed theirs. Happily, potatoes took little preparation for storage. Just some big bags and a cool cellar. Also, I have never had to measure any food in quantities of 100 kilos at a time.
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