Five generations of klippfisk

The rocks behind the Moe house in Kristiansund are flat, pale and slightly warm in the afternoon sun. For a hundred and fifty years they have been the family’s drying racks: split, salted cod is laid out on them in spring and turned by hand until it is hard enough to knock on like wood.

Klippfisk made this town. It was shipped south to Portugal, Spain and Brazil, where it became bacalhau, bacalao and bacalhau again, and the money built the painted wooden houses along the harbour.

Reading the weather

Ole Moe, who is seventy-eight, still decides when the fish go out. He watches the sky, then the gulls, then the fish themselves, which darken slightly when the air is about to turn damp.

The quotas are smaller every year, and the younger Moes now dry most of their fish in a heated hall. But on good days in May the rocks are still covered, and the whole family comes out to turn them.