Man With a Pan by John Donahue

your cod, the longer your cod will last. If you are a stickler for a tight seal (as I am), you can suck the remaining air out of the corner of the Ziploc seal in one fishy inhale and then pinch the corner closed.

    This is what I did with my thirty-five pounds of cod fillets, and I was happy to see that as I stacked them, layer after layer, like cord-wood, they would exactly fit the lower berth of my freezer. It felt like putting money in a bank account. Even better. For unlike freelance-writing income, which is forever subject to deductions in the form of Social Security tax, tuition, and other nuisances, I had full, inalienable title to my cod. I don’t generally align myself with Libertarians, but just let the government try to take my fish away from me and see what happens.
    With my fillets safely packed up, I turned my attention to my new idea of stretching out my cod-fishing dollar. This idea came to me while I was standing next to the Lindenhurst plumber by a pile of guts at the back of the boat after the mate had filleted our catches. “Hey, you know,” he said, looking around at the carnage, “there’s a lot of good meat on those heads!” Even though the plumber’s remark was more apostrophe than prescription, I followed his suggestion and shoved twenty codfish heads into my cooler.
    With the fillets packed away, I finally got to all that “good meat” on the heads. I found there were two ways of doing this. The less efficient is to take a paring knife and work out the flesh just behind the brain casement as well as the circular scallop-shaped piece of muscle above the gill plate, which opens and closes a codfish’s mouth and gills. This I did with about half the heads, until my wrists started to ache. In all, I was able to dig out a gallon-size Ziploc bag full. This meat I froze for later use as cod cakes, cod chowder, and cod popsicles for my son (just kidding on that last one).
    It was, however, the second use of the head that turned out to the pièce de résistance of codfish penny pinching: cod-head spaghetti sauce.
    Flipping through Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, I found a recipe for fish-head sauce, and I set about following it. I fried some onions and garlic in olive oil in the widest pan I had. When everything goldened up nicely, I laid the cod heads right in the hot oil. I sautéed the heads on one side, flipped them, and sautéed them on the other. I then took them out and let them cool. The big pieces, that “good meat” that’s readily noticeable on the shoulders and gill plates that I would have had to dig out with a paring knife if the heads were raw, slid right out when the heads were cooked. Per Marcella’s advice, I put those big chunks aside for later so they wouldn’t overcook in the main body of the sauce.
    The horror show (and the savings!) is what happened with the rest. After sautéing them, I found that the cod heads became rather gelatinous and everything of integrity in them started to come apart—the lips, the tongue, the brain, even the eyes. This gloppy, bony heap turns out to be the ambrosia of cod-head spaghetti sauce. To make use of it, you remove the bigger bones by hand and then put the remaining mess through a hand-cranked food mill. Out of the other side comes a purplish mass that no one who eats this sauce needs to know about. Combined with already simmered tomatoes, parsley, and white wine, the sauce became savory red and delicious. After I mixed in the big chunks of cheek and shoulder meat, it was downright hearty.
    The fishing, the head-meat paring, the head frying, the cleanup—it all left me feeling a little like a juiced-out piece of fruit. Indeed, if I were a person accustomed to being paid by the hour, it would be hard to say that there was any real savings in this cod trip. Exhausted, I laid out my spaghetti and fish-head sauce on a massive platter in front of my family. Joining us that night was a sophisticated and