Cod (27 page)

Still later, flour was added. The sauce reached its height of complexity in the early twentieth century with Auguste Escof fier's elaborate 1921 recipe, which included chunks of veal. But a simpler flour-and-cream béchamel has remained a standard salt cod sauce in Portugal, Spain, Italy, New England (creamed codfish)—wherever salt cod is eaten.

There is no single dish more common to all cod-eating cultures than the codfish ball. At the end of the nineteenth century, while the U.S. Senate debated a proposed pure food act, Senator George Frisbie Hoare, occupying the same august seat from which Daniel Webster had once extolled the virtues of chowder, rose and delivered a lengthy oration on “the exquisite flavor of the codfish, salted, made into balls, and eaten on a Sunday morning.”

The book in which this recipe appears was a ubiquitous classic in early-twentieth-century French households.

The Italian Tante Marie was Ada Boni, editor of Italy's leading women's magazine, Preziosa. Her cookbook first came out in 1928. This recipe is from the fifteenth edition, translated by Mathilde La Rosa.

Pupa is the popular nickname for Providencia Trabal, who is passionate about all Puerto Rican subjects. She used to demonstrate traditional Puerto Rican cooking on television. Now she cooks for relatives in the narrow high-ceilinged kitchen of her San Juan apartment. This is how she makes Bacalaitos.

 

“Aye, Que Bonita!”
she exclaimed, and they are beautiful: two-inch amber puffs with the red and green of the herbs and vegetables brightened from quick cooking.

Some believe
brandade de morue
began in Nimes, but it is more commonly associated with Provence. It was originally called
branlade,
meaning “something that is pummeled,” which it is. The dish had made it to Paris by the time of the French Revolution and never left. In 1894, writer Alphonse Daudet started a circle that met at the Café Voltaire on Place de l‘Odéon for a regular diner de la brandade.

Since salt cod has become expensive, potatoes have been added—
brandade de morue parmentier.
Antoine-Auguste Parmentier was an eighteenth-century officer who popularized the potato in the French Army, and his name has ever since meant “with potatoes.” In 1886,
brandade
was decreed an official part of the enlisted man's mess in the French Army. As the price of salt cod has risen, so has the amount of potatoes in the
brandade.
Sometimes the dish simply seems like fishy mashed potatoes. As American Sara Josepha Hale wrote in her 1841 book,
The Good Housekeeper,
“The salted codfish is cheap food, if potatoes are used freely with it.” The original
brandade
had no potatoes.

The following recipe, by the great nineteenth-century Provençal chef J.-B. Reboul, is especially flavorful because of the use of the skin.

 

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 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.

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.

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.