Newfie food: Fish and brewis

Clockwise from top: salted cod, brewis, potato, and scrunchions.

So back in the days, Newfoundland started off as a fishing place where the British use to send men over to fish cod for six months, and have them come back. I was never really good with numbers and date, so I apologize four not being able to be more precis. One would think that England having colonized so many places would consider diverting some of its resources to building some settlement on Newfoundland so that the poor men wouldn't have to go back and forth between the two continents. Eventually people settled in Newfoundland. (I later found out the reason for not initially having settlement was mainly political, because at the time, the territorial claim for Newfoundland was still unsettled between England and France.) Anyway, apparently they fished so much that the cod population had declined drastically (yea, or boo the advancement of technology...?), and in 1992, the government passed a law to suspend cod fishing (a.k.a. the Cod Moratorium). This moratorium from an environmentalist's point of view was a big save, preserving the few remaining cod, but from a political economical prospective, it was a disaster for the province's economy which relied principally on it's fishing industry, and specifically fishing for cod. Some more history, in 1497 when Giovanni Caboto, an explorer sailing for England landed in Newfoundland, he reported that the deep waters of Newfoundland had "so many cod you could scoop them in baskets". So cod was the image of Newfoundland. Now, two decades after the moratorium, the government has now announced certain periods when the public is allow to fish cod for leisure.

Revenons à nos moutons ( French for come back to our sheep, which I suppose would be equivalent to getting back on topic in English), what you see on my dinner plate in indeed a piece of cod, the fish I was just saying which is no longer permitted to be harvested here. No, we did not catch this fish ourselves, so indeed,  it was store bought. (Correction, the cod for this particular meal came from a family friend who is a fisherman.) The irony is that what use to be a staple traditional meal -salted fish and brewis- is no longer a sustainable local food.

What are brewis (pronounced brews) and scrunchions you ask? Well, brewis is a dried dense bread in the shape of a dinner roll and is prepared by being soaked in water and then boiled. Scrunchions are tiny salted chunks of pork fat that is fried until crisp, and sprinkled onto the meal to add flavour.

A lot of the Newfoundland foods remind me of Québec foods. The scrunchions remind me of les oreilles de crisse (Christ's ears), which are fried fatty pieces of pork cheeks eaten at les cabanes à sucre, farms where they make maple syrup. I am not sure if other parts of Canada have a tradition of eating pickled beets and other vegetables, since as I have already mentioned, I have never really had the opportunity to try other Canadian food while traveling across Canada. However, I have had the pickled beets and vegetables before with quebecois cuisine.

Left to right: From a recent potluck- chili, Fisherman's brewis, soy rice, and green Thai curry.

Note, the fish and brewis meal is not to be confused with Fisherman's brewis, which entails the same two menu items, but in this case, the bones are removed, and cod is crumbled into pieces. Then the fish is mashed together with the cooked brewis and pieces of scrunchions. There might be other ways of eating this combination of cod and brewis which I have yet to encounter.