Cod liver, considered
Perhaps the Duke of Offal and the Potentate of Pancreas are on to something.
When I was a teenager, I worked at a juice shop in SoHo frequented by mildly famous people and a variety of local cranks and eccentrics who got special deals from the owner, a nice guy and a ruthless businessman in the specific way aging hippie entrepreneurs were at the time. In retrospect it seems clear that he was subsidizing the starving-artist set partly out of kindness but also out of self-interest, the idea being that their esoteric orders would impress on a starlet, a guy who used to be in Jawbreaker, or John Lennon’s failson that this was the place to be to get healthy juice. One of the customers drank alarming quantities of carrot juice at least twice a day, and had consequently turned orange; another, who chased triple wheatgrass shots with a pint and a half of kale juice every day, had taken on a distinctly greenish tinge.
Nothing I’ve been told or read about food in the years since has made more of an impression on me than that job did, or done more to make me wary of the idea that because something is good, more of it is better. Not wanting to turn green metaphorically any more than literally, I’ve never been into any kind of supplements. Whatever the benefits of fish oil, for instance, I presume they’re there to be had, and probably best had, by regularly eating moderate amounts of oily fish. Cod liver oil—something I associate with Victorian children’s novels and old people jokingly threatening me with or talking about as something they were forced to endure—has thus been nothing to me but a source of repugnance, my awareness of which represents a link to a vanished past, just like the sense memory of running my finger inside the ashtray set into the arm of an airline seat.
For whatever reason, I’ve never thought of cod liver at all; it was simply a subset of cod liver oil, associated with it as something I don’t think of as food for me any more than I do nootropics. All of this changed recently when a friend asked if I knew of a good canned-fish dealer. I of course recommended Rainbow Tomatoes Garden, my preferred source for its wide selection, excellent service, and good vibes; he got this sampler, which looks great, and I unexpectedly got a store credit for the referral. This brings us around to cod liver oil because the sampler my friend bought contained a tin of cod liver, recommended in this way by Drew Mellon, the man behind the excellent and authoritative Mouth Full of Sardines blog:
Next to Sardines, this is my most consumed tin. Don’t let the word “Liver” scare you off. I like to refer to the cod liver as “Meat Butter” spread it on toast with a dash of salt and pepper! If you like meat and you like butter, well, even if you don’t like meat.
I’m more of a fish and olive oil than a meat butter guy, but still, this spoke to me; while the idea of choking down cod liver oil held no appeal, consuming the organ from which it was extruded did. The rise of the offal-obsessed meat influencer has served as a perpetual reminder not only that a surprising number of men don’t know what sort of physique is only attainable with the use of testosterone and growth hormone but that organs actually are good things to eat; I also don’t think people do things for no reason, and so assume that great-great-grandmothers in their millions forced cod liver oil on millions of great-aunt Marys because they got good effects from doing so, just as I assume that there is a vast bowl of chopped liver in every good deli I’ve ever been in because people order it, and that they order it because they like it.
Store credit in hand, all of this is to say, I made an order at Rainbow Tomatoes Garden and promptly received three tins of cod liver, of which I promptly consumed two. (The third, a gift from generous proprietor Dan Waber, sits proudly in my tin stash.) I now understand the appeal.
The first of the two I tried, Riga Gold, was the less expensive, at a mere $4.50, and comes from “the premier brand of the company GAMMA-A, the largest producer of canned fish in the Baltic states.” All that’s in the tin is cod liver, oil from the cod liver, and a bit of salt. It’s not the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, and it expresses not so much a strong but a deep and rich smell, on which more shortly.
Dan having attached a note strongly advising the can’s consumer to enjoy the rich liver with something acidic, I went what I felt would be a safe route, spreading Dijon mustard on whole-wheat sourdough toast, mashing about half the liver—each can contains 600 calories of, largely, fat—into pâté with salt and pepper, drenching it in lemon, and topping it with spring onions. This didn’t exactly lessen its resemblance to cat food, and in fact both my cat and my dog—the latter a genuine cat-food connoisseur—expressed more interest than they have in any other can I’ve opened in memory. (Both enjoyed the cod liver I didn’t use, the dog more than the cat.)
Mildly apprehensive, I fixed a green salad and an iced tea and made some small talk with my wife, who heroically didn’t ask me to take my lunch elsewhere, about taste being an arbitrary and a pure construct of chance, and then dug in. “Astringent tuna,” I wrote as my only tasting note, and while that isn’t quite right—the flavor is much richer than that of tuna, but much less fishy—it’s close enough. I didn’t love this because I didn’t love the texture, which was a bit slippery for me, but it was completely fine, something I’d probably have liked a bit more if I’d put it on a toasted bagel with something really crunchy like diced red onion, and nothing I’d find unusual if I were served it at the kind of event where people serve pâté on crackers. In fact, I could see myself, if I were in the mood, and if I’d been drinking—and this is definitely a food to have with drinks, if you drink—accidentally eating a lot more of this than would actually be a good idea.
The next day, eager to try some more, I opened my second can, from French brand Mouettes d’Arvor, which makes some of my very favorite sardines. Having done half-assed research into how people eat cod liver, I decided to have it as a sort of salade niçoise, with boiled potatoes and hard-boiled eggs alongside some habanero and cardamom sauerkraut I had in the fridge, which I figured would, between its acidity and crunch and through its being quite hot, complement the bland flavors and textures of everything else quite well.
If I made a questionable decision here, it was in just scooping lumps of cod liver into a mixture of the chopped potatoes and eggs, rather than mashing it up and then mixing it in; this led to irregular placement of lumps of liver. It was fun, though, to spear the quivering blobs through to some potato or egg and then to some spicy sauerkraut, where they melted on the tongue. The dish was good and I’d have it again; spicy pickled green beans would also work really well here. I didn’t notice too much difference, for what it’s worth, between the Mouettes d’Arvor can, which costs $7, and the cheaper Riga one; the pricier one had slightly larger and firmer contiguous pieces of liver, but there wasn’t a hugely noticeable difference in flavor or texture.
In all, I’m not so compelled by cod liver that I’m going to make a point of eating it routinely. Given the way I construct my meals it has a bit less protein and a bit more fat than I usually want out of fish, and with all due respect to influencers who go by names like the Duke of Offal and the Potentate of Pancreas and warn against poisonous peaches and Swiss chard while recommending you eat raw wolf liver twice a day, I’m not particularly looking to megadose on any of the various vitamins which cod liver has in startling abundance. There is one more issue I should note, which is less than the smell of the oil (this isn’t an especially funky tin) than its sheer persistence. I would strongly advise cleaning the tin out for recycling by putting any excess liver or oil in a Ziploc and disposing of it outside before cleaning the can for recycling and not, say, pouring any excess oil down your utility sink. Far be it from me to even suggest one might not recycle the can, but anyone who were to simply put the can and any excess liver or oil in a Ziploc and get rid of it would be rewarded in concrete ways.
Despite all of this—which is a lot of this—I don’t see why cans of the stuff won’t go in my pantry and make their way into my rotation, though; it’s cheap, good, and exceptionally nutritious, and has a different flavor and texture profile from the sardines, mackerel, and mussels I do eat regularly. I’d recommend you try it.
Housekeeping
—Popping Tins gained hundreds of new subscribers (bringing the total to an inexplicable 6,400) after being mentioned in the lede of this excellent Vivian Yee story in the New York Times about how the workings of global capital have made it so that Tunisia, where canned tuna is a ubiquitous and integral part of the food culture, is increasingly subsisting on low-quality, largely imported tuna even as some of the best tuna in the world is fished off and exported from its shores. Welcome to all these new readers and thank you to those I haven’t run off yet!