Codfish à l'Espagnole
Take a salt codfish, let it soak, simmer it on a slow fire, let it drip, and cut it in pieces. Put in the oven three or four large sweet peppers, skin them, slice them lengthwise, salt and pepper them.
Put two spoonfuls of sweet oil in a frying-pan. Chop up fine two onions, a piece of garlic, some parsley, cut up four fresh tomatoes, salt and pepper. Let it all cook for half an hour, add a half cupful of bouillon in which you dissolve a teaspoonful of flour, let it cook ten minutes, take out your parsley.
Boil a dozen Irish potatoes in their jackets, peel and slice them, line the bottom of a dish with them, then put some pieces of codfish, then some slices of sweet pepper, then tomato sauce, and a sprinkling of bread crumbs. Put in the oven thirty-five minutes.—Canned tomatoes and peppers can be used instead of fresh.
Salt cod dressed in the Spanish manner — roasted peppers, tomato, garlic and olive oil — a dish that speaks to Louisiana’s Spanish past.
- “Sweet oil” is olive oilTwo spoonfuls means about 2 Tbsp; the olive oil is essential to the Spanish character here.
- Soak, then never boilSoak the salt cod for hours to freshen it, then simmer gently — boiling toughens it. Let it drip dry before flaking into pieces.
- Roast and peel the peppers“Put in the oven” until the skins blister, then slip them off — the same trick that makes roasted peppers sweet and silky today.
- “Irish potatoes”Simply ordinary white potatoes (as opposed to sweet potatoes), boiled in their jackets and sliced to line the dish.
- The sauce and the bakeA teaspoon of flour in half a cup of bouillon lightly thickens the tomato sauce; bake the layered dish in a moderate oven (350°F) for its 35 minutes.
- Fresh or cannedThe recipe itself blesses canned tomatoes and peppers — a perfectly good shortcut.
The à l’espagnole is no accident. Spain governed Louisiana from 1763 to 1803, and Spanish taste left a lasting mark on the Creole kitchen — here in the form of bacalao, salt cod baked with peppers, tomato and olive oil. Spain caught little cod of its own but grew devoted to the salted fish brought home by Basque crews from the Newfoundland banks, making it a national obsession, especially for Lent. A New Orleans cook layering salt cod with roasted peppers was working, knowingly or not, in a long Iberian tradition carried across the Atlantic.
From page 26 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
