Fisheries: Processing and Preserving Fish

Schooner Salting Down a Herring Catch

In the days of the schooners, offshore fishermen processed their catch aboard their vessel. The fish’s head was cut off, and it was split longitudinally down the belly side. The entrails, called gurry, were removed, and the cod’s liver was saved for cod liver oil.  The backbone was removed, the fish was washed in salt water, and then stored below deck in salt. Salting the fish was left to experienced fishermen, who knew just the right amount to use. A large schooner might take with it 150 hogsheads (about 560 pounds each) of salt for a season’s fishing. Salt was the most expensive purchase made for a voyage, and had to be imported.

Castine specialized in the salt trade in the early 19th century. The St. Leon, owned in Castine, often carried salt which was then sold around the Bay.

After the schooner returned home, the fish was rinsed and salted again, then laid out to dry on wooden slats called flakes. The product was called salt dried cod. Some herring was used fresh for bait, and some was salted. Both herring and mackerel were also pickled in barrels. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Maine became a world leader in canning small herring with oil or sauces to create sardines. Starting from one cannery in 1875, by 1908, 33 canneries produced sardines. Most were in Washington County; Penobscot Bay had four.

Ship St. Leon

Sardine Man

Many of these also canned clams. At the same time there were 86 companies that produced smoked herring and other fish. More people worked in fish processing than in fishing. By the mid-twentieth century factory ships processed groundfish for frozen fish fillets, using special machinery designed to cut fillets before the fish was flash frozen. Clams, mussels, crabs, lobsters, and oysters need little processing before they are eaten, as long as they are fresh. Scallops are normally split open and the meats cut out before the fishing vessel returns to dock. Most seafood today is sold fresh, frozen, smoked, or canned, and only a small percentage is cured and dried in salt, or pickled. Air transportation, hermetically-sealed containers, and refrigerated vehicles make it possible for people to have fresh fish almost anywhere.

Maine now supplies the Far East with sushi-quality tuna, sea urchin roe, elvers, and other delicacies. And Maine now imports fish from Canada, Northern Europe, Southeast Asia, South America, and other parts of the world.

Drying Fish, Bucksport

Inside a Sardine Factory