Split down the belly, salted and hung on wooden racks in the wind, cod keeps for years. That single fact financed half the voyages that went looking for the rest of the world: a ship could sail for months on a cargo that needed neither ice nor barrels.
The Lofoten fishery is the oldest of them. Every winter the skrei — mature cod that spend their lives in the Barents Sea — return to spawn along the Norwegian coast, and for a thousand years the islands have emptied their houses to meet them. The stockfish that leaves those racks in spring is the same product Viking crews carried, unchanged in method if not in scale.
How it is taken
By handline from an open boat, one fish at a time, which is how it was done for most of that thousand years. By longline — a single line carrying hundreds of baited hooks, set and hauled over hours. By gillnet, a wall of mesh a fish swims into and cannot back out of. Each method leaves a different mark on the catch, and a buyer in Bergen could once tell them apart by looking.