Provincetown Seafood Cookbook

Introduction

PROVINCETOWN is the birthplace of the commercial fishing industry of the U.S.A. It’s the seafood capital of the universe, the fishiest town in the world. Cities like Gloucester, Boston, New Bedford and San Diego may have bigger fleets, but they just feed the canneries; Provincetown supplies fresh fish for the tables of gourmets everywhere. All the fish wholesalers in New York and Boston know that Provincetown fresh fish is the best there is. Our fleet is small but its catch packs a wallop in marketing circles.

From the earliest days of its history Provincetown has been synonymous with fish. Explorers like Champlain and Gosnold in the early 1600’s were amazed at the teeming shoals of fish that abounded in our waters. Gosnold described Provincetown Harbor in his journal: It’s a harbour wherein may anchor a thousand ships, and there we tooke great stoare of codfysshes.

Drawn by J. W. Barber—Engraved by S. E. Brown, Boston.

VIEW OF PROVINCETOWN FROM THE NORTHEAST IN 1840

This is the oldest known print of the town.

He dubbed it forthwith Cape Cod, and the name stuck. Earlier the Vikings had called it Wunderstrand or Keel Cape, but those names didn’t last. Breton, Basque and Portuguese fishermen in the 1500’s probably had a summer camp and fish-drying racks on the beach at Provincetown, a convenient spot for curing their catches of cod and haddock harvested both off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and in local waters. These tough, hardy fishermen were among the best sailors and navigators of the world, and there is a belief that they may have discovered the New World a good many years before Columbus set foot on San Salvador.

No other town was literally spawned by the fishery as was Provincetown. The Cape Tip was one of the first areas in America to be set aside solely as a fishing preserve. The General Court of the Old Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1670 set aside the Province Lands (end of the Cape and the site of Provincetown) to be shared in by all the citizens of the colony who were able to afford the license fees required to participate in the fishery. This was also a protective measure to try to keep out fishermen from the other colonies, and those furriners—the French and Portuguese. The first settlement was a bunch of fishermen’s shacks on the beach, squatters on the public domain, and even down to today everybody in Provincetown is a squatter of sorts; the only kind of legal deed hereabouts has always been a quitclaim deed.

It was a wild and wooly place, inhabited by a cosmopolitan mob of fishermen, smugglers, outlaws, escaped indentured servants, filles de joie, heavy drinkers and roisterers—with no church or law officers; Helltown was its general nickname, although this name is more properly applied to a small settlement which was established later out at Herring Cove near Race Point.

These wild goings-on really shocked the solid Christian citizens of neighboring Truro, because from the earliest times they had tried to latch onto the Cape Tip and call it a suburb. Around 1710, they petitioned the General Court in Plymouth to clarify the status of the Cape End in order that we may know what to do about certain individuals there; these zealous bigots were all in favor of a Puritanical pogrom to clean the place out. The General Court then established the Precinct of Cape Cod. This gave Provincetown its independence.

VIEW OF PROVINCETOWN IN 1843

Early artists always showed Provincetowners without any feet. They were buried in the sand.

In those days Provincetown was literally the one and only Cape Cod. The rest of the Cape was Massachusetts Bay Colony. A few years later came incorporation and official christening of the town as Provincetown instead of Helltown, but the roistering was still going on as jolly as ever, and it was the top fishing town of America. The Congregationalists, and later the Methodists, came in and set up churches and partially Christianized the heathen, and when the Portuguese came, they brought the Church of Rome. But no preachers and no credos could completely tame this weird place; down to modern times it has had a wicked, wild streak in it, four hundred years young and half mile wide—and lots of headaches for the forces of law and order and morality.

From the earliest times, cod, haddock and mackerel have been the top fish of Provincetown. Since they are close cousins and lookalikes, the cod and haddock were lumped together as cod in the old days. Provincetown’s beaches were once lined with fish drying platforms called flakes. The curing fish had to be put out each morning at sunrise and taken in at sunset. It was a gruelling chore in which even the women and children had to participate.

These fish flakes were large, flat, horizontal tables, thirty to thirty-six inches high, with tops of triangular wooden slats spaced an inch or so apart to afford drainage and ventilation. The fishing vessels brought in their fares of cod and haddock already split, cleaned and salted down in barrels. These were ferried ashore in dories and carefully washed in the surf on the beach to remove their excess salt. Next they were soaked in new brine pickle in clean barrels for several days. Later they were taken from the brine and dried on the flakes in the sun until they were hard as a bone. This process was called making fish. And making fish was really the making of Provincetown.

From 1830 to 1850 the town had a thriving saltmaking industry. Windmills lined the beach pumping salt seawater into flat evaporation vats on the shore. Many visitors remarked that the windmills gave the town a Netherlandish look (see the illustration). Most of the salt produced was used locally to cure the fish catch. Almost every square foot of ground in Provincetown which wasn’t occupied by a house was covered by the evaporation vats or the fish flakes; they filled back yards, front yards and all the space along the beach. Discovery of salt mines in New York State in the 1850’s killed Provincetown’s saltmaking industry; when the vats were dismantled much of the lumber was used to build new houses. These salt-impregnated timbers were almost impervious to mildew, dry rot and decay. And also to paint; when a man kept slapping paint on his house and it peeled right off he’d eventually give up in disgust and say, It’s a salt works house.

WASHING FISH IN A DORY AT P.N. WHORF’S WHARF, 1910

The Schooners at the left have just returned from the Grand Banks and are drying out their sails.

Thoreau eloquently describes the Provincetown waterfront scenes of the 1840’s when he paid a visit here.

He said that Provincetown milk had a definitely fishy flavor because the cows hung around on the beach all day eating salt codfish heads. These codfish heads went down in history through a folk song which was popular in those days:

Cape Cod boys, they have no sleds

They slide down dunes on codfish heads.

Cape Cod girls they have no combs

They comb their hair with codfish bones.

WASHING FISH IN THE SURF

Around 1910 the Grand Banks schooner Lottie Bryant docked at Matheson’s Wharf at the foot of Court Street. The catch was thrown overboard and the crew washed off the excess salt in the surf. They were then transported by wheelbarrow to the flake yards.

This salt cod fishery was well before the days of refrigeration, and most of this product was shipped to Portugal, Spain, South France and Italy, where it was a dietary staple—bacalhau to the Portuguese, bacalao to the Spanish and bacala in Italy. Some of the greatest gourmet dishes ever conceived were constructed by Mediterranean chefs from this early Provincetown product.

Provincetown always maintained a fleet of Grand Bankers, large schooners that sailed on months-long voyages to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, harvesting the cod and haddock. There was also a fleet of smaller boats that fished on Georges Bank, fifty miles out in the Atlantic from Chatham and stretching northward.

Weather prediction was a primitive thing in those days, and fishing was one of the most hazardous occupations in the world. Fifty-seven natives of Truro were drowned in seven wrecked vessels in the October gale of 1841 (it was probably a tropical hurricane). That wise old seadog Captain Mathias Rich, of Provincetown, was on the way to the fishing grounds, but when he saw the seagulls and other seabirds hightailing it toward shore he turned his boat around and highballed for home. He was off Highland Light when the fury of the tempest struck, and had a hard time making it around Race Point to the safety of Herring Cove. The Truro boats were not so lucky, and they were nearly all swamped.

Provincetown and Truro cemeteries are full of tombstones marked lost at sea. Shebnah Rich in his great book Truro, Landmarks and Seamarks lists the names of hundreds of Truro men who went down to watery graves; this fearful mortality was what led to Truro’s becoming a ghost town, almost. Only two families in the whole township today live in the houses built by their ancestors. Provincetown would have gone the same way if the Portuguese hadn’t moved in to replace the vanishing Yankees.

The boats used by Cape Cod fishermen were many and varied. At first the Indians, of course, used their canoes. The early colonists were not seafaring people and small shallops, pinnaces, and ketches were sufficient for their close-to-shore fishing enterprises. Thus it went for the first hundred years. But after Provincetown was settled in the eighteenth century and the fishing business began to flourish, larger boats were required. Mellen C. Hatch describes them thus: After the Revolution came the pink sterned ‘Chebacco boats,’ named for the parish of Chebacco (now Essex) in Ipswich, and the square sterned ‘Dogbodies,’ both with primitive two masted schooner rig without headsails. From these developed the true ‘Pinkies,’ schooner rigged with bowsprit and jib, and with the characteristic sharp stern and very pronounced sheer of the schooner type. This craft while slow, was burdensome, seaworthy and weatherly; it was inexpensive to build and cheap to run; and until the mid-nineteenth century it was the poor man’s fishing boat. There were sloops in the business too, and the schooner was passing through its other early stages of design, such as the roundbottomed high quarterdecked ‘Heel Tappers,’ to the more conventional types which were almost universally used. These latter swift vessels are described in another paragraph below.

THE OLD UNION WHARF

The notch in the center building was for clearance of bowsprits of whaling vessels and large Grand Banks schooners when they were brought up on the marine railway (out of sight behind the building).

From time immemorial it had been the Provincetown custom to either anchor the boats in the harbor or drag them ashore on the beach, but around 1830 some smart fellow thought up the idea of building a wharf, and when it was finished it worked so well that others followed in rapid succession. For the next fifty years the town went on a wharf-building spree. A bird’s-eye view of the town drawn in 1882 shows forty-four wharves, large and small. The largest of these wharves were self-contained communities, beehives of activity; the Central Wharf at the foot of Central Street (behind the present Boatslip Motel) and the Union Wharf (behind Sal Del Deo’s Restaurant) were two of the largest. They had marine railways which could haul the largest Grand Bankers and whaling vessels up out of the water for repairs. They each had fish and gear storehouses, a packing shed, a sail loft, a paint shop, a blacksmith shop, grocery, chandler, and hardware stores. The wharf behind Dyer’s Hardware Store made a specialty of outfitting whaling vessels, getting them ready for two or three year voyages which would sometimes take them all the way around the world. Many of the wharves, such as Hilliard’s Wharf (behind the present Lands End Marine), were covered with fish drying flakes.

A major disaster struck Provincetown on November 26, 1898, the so-called Portland Gale, the worst storm in the history of the town. The wind reached gale force by 10 o’clock that night, and by 4 A.M. had attained full hurricane force, which lasted for several hours. Nearly all the wharves in town were badly damaged and some of the largest were totally destroyed, including the Central and the Union. The boats in the harbor were either sunk at their moorings or smashed into the beach and piled up like kindling wood. The entire crew of one vessel, five men, froze to death while clinging to the rigging of their sunken craft, only a few feet from the beach; had they only known their location they could have jumped overboard and made it ashore.

MAKING FISH ON HILLIARD’S WHARF, 1890

After the Portland Gale, wharf building came to a halt and today there are only four wharves left in Provincetown. But there are plenty of ghosts. As you walk along the beach at low tide and see the rows of rotting stubs of pilings sticking up from the sand and stretching far out into the harbor, it’s not very difficult to summon up visions of the old wharves with their multifarious activities in full swing, and somewhere close by, the ghost of some ancient mariner is bound to be singing Shenandoah.

Provincetown fishermen have used just about every fishing method in the book. In the early days they fished with handlines over the gunwales of their vessels or from dories. Later they fished with long line trawls. A large schooner would have a crew of eighteen to twenty men and about ten dories nesting on the deck. When they reached the fishing grounds, the dories would be launched, two men to the boat, one to fish and one to row. The long line trawls with baited hooks every six feet were coiled in tubes in the bottom of the dory, to be played out as the dory moved along, and later to be hauled in. This trawling was the standard method of fishing for groundfish, cod, haddock, flounder and the like until well into the twentieth century; it was the method used in the Georges Bank and Grand Bank fisheries. It was a dangerous business. The dories had to stay within sight of the mother ship; if a sudden fog or storm came up and they couldn’t find their ship, they could be lost forever. Each dory was equipped with a large conch shell horn for the men to blow in case they became lost in the fog. The mother vessel was also equipped with fog horns. The faithful horns saved many lives, but at the end of each year the records would show the names of several fisherman and the brief notation lost in a fog.

FRESH FISHING SCHOONERS AT ANCHOR

Seining was the standard method for catching mackerel and other surface swimming school fish. Gill netting was also popular; when the fish poked his nose through the mesh of the net, it caught him by the gills and he was done for.

When the railroad came to Provincetown in 1873 it created a revolution in the fishing industry; what was called the fresh fishery came into being. The boats could sail to Stellwagen Bank north of Race Point, or to Georges Bank, fill their holds with fresh fish, bring it to Town Wharf and ship it out on the train; it would be on sale the next day, sparkling fresh, in the markets of New York and Boston. This was when Provincetown fresh fish came into its great fame. The boats used in this fishery had to be very fast, and as the design of the Provincetown fishing schooner was perfected, they became the swiftest things under sail in America. They could outsail Commodore Vanderbilt’s yachts. As they raced with one another on the return from the fishing grounds to Provincetown’s Railroad Wharf or to the T Wharf in Boston, it produced some of the greatest contests in the history of sailing. But it was just everyday work for them, and none of the details were recorded. The captain whose boat caught the most fish and got them back the fastest was called The Killer, and there was great competition (and sometimes skullduggery) among crews and boats to achieve and maintain this title. The Killers of Provincetown were famous up and down the Atlantic Coast as the best sailors and the best fishermen in the business. I met the last of these Killers when I first came to Provincetown, Captain Frank Vardee Gaspa, of the schooner Valerie. He was over eighty years old, but he had the proud bearing of a prince of the blood; he smoked good Havana cigars and drank the best French brandy. He had dashing handlebar moustaches in his younger days, and it didn’t take much stretch of the imagination to see him back in 1915 when he was the high-line Killer: dressed in a white linen suit and a Panama hat, he would casually stroll into the Parker House in Boston and order a champagne and oyster supper for his crew; hadn’t they, by a full twenty minutes, beaten the Jessie Costa to the T Wharf that very afternoon?

Speaking of these schooners, Mellen C. M. Hatch said: "The Massachusetts fishing schooner was, at the turn of the twentieth century, as fine and able a sailing craft as ever put to sea. Perfection in design, in construction, and in handling made them what they were, and their everyday performance in the usual routine of their work has never been excelled by anything afloat under sail.

GIANT BLUEFIN TUNA IN THE HOLD OF A TRAPBOAT

They rank on even terms with the clipper ships as the ultimate expression of the maritime genius of America." And Provincetown was the home port of the best of them.

Trap fishing was almost an industry unto itself and the trapboat men were a proud and hardy bunch. Up until a few years ago you could count a dozen large weirs or traps off the shore in Truro, in Provincetown Harbor, and on the outside by Wood End and Herring Cove. These traps were nets on poles so arranged that schools of fish swimming along were directed by a guide net into a central pocket or bowl from which they could not escape. The trapboat would move alongside the loaded trap and the crewmen, by pulling on a rope called a jilson, would close the bottom of the bowl; then nothing whatever could escape. The bowl was raised out of the water and the fish bailed out and dumped into the hold of the boat. There was no sport in it; it was monotonous hard work for the fishermen involved. They would catch enormous quantities of mackerel, herring, striped bass and other school fish. But things would get really exciting when they began to catch schools of giant bluefin tuna, the famous horse mackerel. Fish of one or two hundred pounds could be gaffed alive and quickly lifted from the net and pitched into the hold of the boat, but fish of 500 pounds or more were very dangerous and could tear the net to shreds if not handled properly. The accepted method was to shoot them with a shotgun and then haul them aboard.

A MODERN DRAGGER

There were half a dozen large cold storage establishments, or freezers, in Provincetown in the period 1895 to 1940 to handle the catch of the traps and trapboats. Today the freezers are all gone. The trap fishing industry is dying; there are only four traps and one trapboat left, and they will probably disappear soon. The great trapboat captains of the past, such as Didda Roderick and Nonnie Fields, have all gone to their reward along with most of their crews, and their departure has left a vacuum in the town that will never be filled.

Today’s fishing fleet is composed of diesel-powered draggers which pull their bag-like otter trawls across the bottom of the sea. There are about thirty of these vessels in the Provincetown fleet, and when the summer tourists go home the fleet becomes the economic backbone of the town. But economic and ecologic problems have become so acute that no one can say for certain whether the fleet will grow or become extinct; as the catches become smaller and fuel and operating costs rise to astronomic heights, it becomes pretty obvious that the government is going to have to help; it will have to subsidize the fishermen in the same way that it now supports the wheat and cotton farmers.

But as long as the codfish and flounders are with us, things will turn out all right.

Today, codfish still ranks near the top as a money fish for the fleet of Provincetown, but it’s a fresh fish market now. A good fresh codfish steak broiled in butter and smothered under a blanket of Portuguese molho tomate sauce is treat enough to make any gourmet get excited. Codfish cheeks, tongues and jawbones, when dipped in bread crumbs and fried like chicken, actually look like the leg and thigh of a chicken—and by golly they taste even better (this is also true of haddock cheeks and jawbones). Cod and haddock heads make one of the world’s best fish chowders.

One of the saddest