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It's cod season once again in the far north of Norway, and Røst--a remote scatter of rocky islets off the outermost tip of Norway's Lofoten Islands--is once more the honeypot for fishermen seeking jackpot paychecks in the lucrative dried cod trade, Norway's oldest export industry, dating back to the Viking days.

Every winter, for more than a thousand years, Norwegian fishermen have flocked to these parts to scoop up the bounty of big, meaty migrating cod that come streaming down by the millions from the Barents Sea to breed among the reefs and shoals around the Lofoten Islands, and most especially here around Røst.

The fish are cleaned and gutted and hung by their tails, in pairs, to dry in the traditional manner, on slatted wooden frames that can be seen all over the island. Then the catch is rendered into stockfish--the nutritious cod jerky that once sustained the Vikings on their long sea voyages and, today, is a highly prized delicacy in Italy, where it's a key ingredient in traditional regional dishes from Venice, Naples, Genoa, and Calabria.

"Stockfish isn't an Italian product, but sometimes you could almost imagine that it was," says Olaf Pedersen, a former CEO of Glea Sjømat, one of Røst's main stockfish companies, founded by his grandfather in 1936. "Over the centuries it has become deeply ingrained into their culinary and cultural traditions."

Indeed, the Ligurian town of Badalucco holds a stockfish festival every year to commemorate the time, back in the Middle Ages, when the townspeople survived a siege by Moorish invaders by eating only stockfish. And over near Venice, on the opposite side of the country, the town of Sandrigo hosts the world's largest stockfish festival--the Festa del Bacalà, held every September in celebration of the famed regional dish Baccalà alla Vicentina.

So important is the Italian market to Norway's stockfish producers that Pedersen recently moved from Røst to Milan, where he now looks after the interests of a collective of 22 stockfish producers. Lofoten stockfish was recently awarded Denomination of Origin status, meaning it enjoys the same legal protections as Parma ham and French champagne.

Any way you want to measure it, it's a long way from the warm Mediterranean sunshine to the moody skies over Røst, whose 365 islets and skerries are home to a few hundred hardy Norwegians and about a million seabirds. Yet the links between these two very different places go back nearly 600 years, to the shipwreck in 1432 of a Venetian merchant trader named Pietro Quirini. After his boat sank, he spent three enjoyable months with the islanders, and on his return to Italy, presented an account of his adventures to the Venetian senate.

He also brought back some stockfish. The rich, nutritious, intensely flavored cod jerky proved an instant culinary hit, finding its way into regional dishes all over the country. An improbable new trade route was born, linking the Renaissance city states then comprising Italy with the lonely windswept isles of Røst.

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