The following recipe, by the great nineteenth-century Provençal chef J.-B. Reboul, is especially flavorful because of the use of the skin.
MORUE EN BRANDADE
Use good salt cod, not too soaked and well scaled, cook as above (soaked 12 hours in fresh water, scaled and cut in squares. Put in a pot covered in cold water, put on the heat until a foam rises to the surface and skim it off), drain it. Carefully remove the bones, but leave the skin which contributes a great deal to the success of the operation. Put the well-cared-for pieces in a pot placed on a corner, so that it is gently heated with the milk in a small pot to one side and the oil in another, both moderately warm. Begin adding a spoonful of oil to the salt cod, work it strongly with a wooden spoon, crushing the piece against the sides of the pot, adding from time to time, little by little, the oil and the milk, alternating the two but always working hard with the wooden spoon. When the preparation becomes creamy, when you can no longer make out any pieces, the brandade is finished.
—J.-B. Reboul,
La Cuisinière Provençale, Marseille, 1910
The author goes on to suggest that truffles, lemon juice, white pepper, grated nutmeg, or garlic can be added and concludes by warning: “If we were health advisers, we might counsel you to use this dish in moderation.”
THE FISH THAT SPOKE BASQUE
The most highly developed salt cod cuisine in the world is that of the Spanish Basque provinces. Until the nineteenth century, salt cod was exclusively food of the poor, usually broken up in stews. In PYSBE’s 1936 collection of salt cod recipes, the largest section is devoted to stews. Few of these old-style salt cod dishes can still be found in the restaurants of the Basque provinces, but they are still made at home from the least expensive cut of bacalao: desmigado (trimmings). The most expensive cuts are tongues and lomo, the choice center cut of a fillet from high up near the head, cut from a larger cod.
WITH CIDER
A salt cod omelette and chuleta-a shell steak, coated in salt and then grilled—are the two specialties of Basque cider mills. In both cases, the idea is to serve something salty to induce thirst. In San Sebastián’s province of Guizpúzcoa, cider mills, sidrerias, are open only from January to April, during which time they try to lure as many people as possible to their tasting rooms so that they will have customers after the barrel-fermented cider is bottled in April. Customers are served food while standing at tall tables. Then, thirsty from the salt, they wander to the tasting room, sample, wander back and eat a little more, then taste some more. The cider room has barrels ten feet high. A hole is tapped, and customers stand in the middle of the room and catch the cider in large, straight-sided glasses, as it spouts from the hole. The glasses should be held vertically so that the cider hits the far side, not the bottom, creating a slight head as the taster walks his glass toward the barrel and then lifts it away, freeing the spout to land in the waiting glass of the next taster at the back of the room. Remarkably little cider ends up on the floor, which is probably proof of its low alcohol content.
The following recipe comes from a sidreria in a wooded mountain suburb of San Sebastián. The omelette has a wonderful salt cod taste, which is probably enhanced by using a far better cut than is traditional for this dish.
Soak the lomo for 36 hours and no longer to keep a little taste. Sauté chopped onions and a pinch of parsley in olive oil. Add the soaked and drained salt cod. Then add eggs beaten with a small amount of water. The secret is to do all this very quickly.
—Nati Sancho, cook for Sidreria Zelaia, 1996
BACALAO A LA VIZCAÍNA
In the nineteenth century, elegant salt cod dishes were created using a choice piece of lomo, always kept whole with the skin left on and served with a sauce. Three dishes became, and remain, dominant: bacalao a la Vizcaina, al pil pil, and club ranero . With their red, yellow, and orange sauces, the beauty of these dishes was part of their appeal. Like the standard repertoire of a concert violinist, all great Basque chefs must demonstrate some skill in these three dishes without taking liberties with the standard recipes. Great debates circulate over arcane issues such as the soaking of the fish. Should it be thirty-eight hours as Jenaro Pildain at Guria in Bilbao says, or forty-eight as recommended by Juan Jose Castillo at Casa Nicolas in San Sebastián? Pildain soaks it in the refrigerator. Castillo sometimes uses mineral water for soaking, claiming he detects a chlorine taste in the tap water.
Despite their elegance, these dishes used to appear in the most humble settings. Before the Spanish Civil war, a woman owned a tavern in Arakaldo, a small Basque village in Vizcaya. Typical of the inexpensive village eateries of the 1930s, the tavern in Arakaldo offered all the classic salt cod dishes to the poor people of the village. Her son worked with her and learned the repertoire. Today he is often referred to as el rey de bacalao (the king of salt cod). His famous restaurant on the main commercial street of Bilbao, Restaurante Guria, is considered the definitive place for the three classic dishes which he learned from his mother.
“Funny, it was food for poor people then. Now they are the most prestigious dishes I do,” said Pildain.
Although he offered the following recipe, he also pointed out that it takes him a year to train a new cook to do the salt cod dishes.
An 1888 Spanish book made the claim that the two Spanish dishes most known in the rest of the world were paella and bacalao a la Vizcaína. More than 100 years later, this is still true. And yet bacalao a la Vizcaína is a dish that is almost impossible to reproduce. The sauce is based on a chubby little green pepper, the choricero, which grows to about three inches in length and then turns red and is dried. Until recently, the choricero grew only in the province of Vizcaya and is still native only to northern Spain.
In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, where Cubans and Puerto Ricans regard this dish as part of their own national cuisine, their version does not even resemble the original. Not only is the pepper not available, but the West Indies quality of salt cod can only be broken up and stewed, usually with tomatoes and potatoes.
For 6 people:
12 pieces of salt cod 200 grams each
1 liter of vizcaina sauce
4 garlic cloves
I liter of olive oil
Soak the salt cod for about 36 to 44 hours. During this time change the water every 8 hours. Taste to see if it has been long enough for the fish to be perfectly desalinated. If so, remove the salt cod from the water and drain it. Scale it well and remove bones.
Place a deep pan with oil and sliced garlic cloves on heat, remove the garlics once they are golden. Place the salt cod with the skin side up in the pan and poach for about 5 minutes. Remove the salt cod when well-cooked and pour on the vizcaina sauce.
For 1 liter of vizcaina sauce:
I kilo of red and white onions
10 meaty choricero peppers
75 grams of ham
2 parsley bunches
½ liter olive oil
1 liter beef stock
30 grams of butter
3 garlic cloves
ground white pepper
salt
Put oil with garlic on heat in an aluminum pan. Once the garlic is golden add chopped onions, ham, and parsley, cooking strongly for 5 minutes and on low heat for another 30 minutes, stirring with a skimmer to avoid sticking to the pan. Open and remove seeds from the choricero peppers and place in lukewarm water over heat. When it starts to boil add a little cold water to slow it down. Repeat this four times. Drain the peppers well and add to the already prepared mixture. Cook for 5 minutes over a low heat, take off the oil and the parsley and add the beef stock, the white pepper, and salt, letting it cook 15 minutes more. When well cooked, pass through a blender and then twice through a strainer. Put it back on the heat for 5 minutes, work in the butter, and adjust salt and pepper to make it perfect.
—Jenaro Pildain, Restaurante Guria, Bilbao, 1996
HOW TO COOK THE LAST LARGE COD
ON CHOOSING A FRESH COD: “THE HEAD SHOULD
BE
LARGE; TAIL SMALL; SHOULDERS THICK; LIVER,
CREAMY WHITE; AND THE SKIN CLEAR AND SILVERY
WITH A BRONZE LIKE SHEEN.”
—British Admiralty,
Manual of Naval Cookery, 1921
Only people who have lived by the North Atlantic understand the quality of fresh cod. It does not even resemble, except maybe in color, a fresh frozen cod. Fresh cod will inconveniently fall apart in cooking, which was why Sam Lee’s New Orleans customer did not like his shipment. If it does not flake, it is not fresh. Fresh cod is “white, delicate, resilient,” according to Paris chef Alain Senderens. “It will not tolerate long cooking. If you cook it carefully, cod will flake and give off milky cooking juices.”
People who know fresh cod—from the great restaurants of France, to British working-class fish shops, to the St. John’s waterfront—all agree on three things: It should be cooked quickly and gently, it should be prepared simply, and, above all, it must be a thick piece. Only a large piece can be properly cooked. The Lyons region’s celebrated Paul Bocuse begins a simple recipe for fresh cod with potatoes and onions: “Use a piece of cod about 30 centimeters long cut from the center of the fish.” The center of the fish is the thickest part. Bocuse is talking about the choice center of a three-foot cod, which is what everyone who knows fresh cod wants. But it is getting hard to find.
Alexandre Dumas gave these tips on selecting cod: “Choose a handsome spotted cod from Ostende or the Channel.... the best have white skin and yellow spots.” He also offered the following recipe:
BREADED COD
Cut the cod in five or six pieces, marinate with salt, pepper, parsley, shallots, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, green onions, basil; all chopped, the juice of two lemons and melted butter, prepare it with the marinade and bread it and cook it in a country oven.
—Alexandre Dumas,
Le Grande Dictionnaire de cuisine, 1873 (posthumous)
COD BONDING
Wherever there are Norwegian communities, there are cod clubs. There is one in New York and four in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The clubs are usually exclusively for men. According to Bjarne Grindem, the former Norwegian consul in Minneapolis, three of the four in the Twin Cities are all men, and the fourth is “more liberal.” Although cod clubs claim to be exclusive and applicants wait for years for a place, each club has as many as 200 members. One hundred or more men get together once a month at lunchtime, and the meal is always boiled cod and potatoes with melted butter served with aquavit and flat bread, called kavli. “Whether they get together to get together or get together to eat cod is another question, but they always get together around the cod,” said Grindem. The oldest, most exclusive of the Twin City clubs is the Norwegian Codfish Club at the Interlochen country club in Edina. While the members gave lectures on the exact way to prepare a boiled cod, never letting the water actually boil, the kitchen at the Interlochen was more prosaic: “You mix salt water and bring to a boil and put the fish in and cover and cook for half an hour. It’s a good thick fish, about a pound a person.”
THE LAST OF THE NORTHERN STOCK
Stella’s is a popular, cozy little restaurant on the St. John’s waterfront. Miraculously, one day the restaurant was able to buy enough large, thick, cod fillets from the Sentinel Fishery to put this old standard back on the menu for one night—just a teaser, reminding Newfoundlanders of what they were missing. Stella’s defies Newfoundland tradition and refuses to use pork fat, understandably regarding it as unhealthy.
PANFRIED COD
4 fresh cod fillets
2 eggs beaten with ¼ cup milk
1 cup flour mixed with 1 teaspoon paprika, ¼ teaspoon
black pepper, 1 teaspoon parsley
Dip fish in egg mixture, then in flour mixture. Have pan hot. Then fry in vegetable oil-very hot, then as soon as you put the fish in, turn it down.
—Mary Thornhill, Stella’s Restaurant, St. John‘s, 1996
MEASUREMENT EQUIVALENTS
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