Brandade
The first receipt for a brandade which appeared in print was written by Grimod de la Reynière, and is as follows:-"Among the provincial ragouts in most distinguished favour in Paris are the brandades of salt fish. A restaurateur of the Palais Royal is well known to have made his fortune by his method of preparing them. We give the receipt as it was communicated to us in a village of Languedoc which enjoys a reputation for this very article at once brilliant and merited. The singular name of brandade, though not found in any dictionary, is derived doubtless from the old French verb brandir, which means to shake ; and this action, almost continual, is in fact indispensable to render the ragout what it ought to be. Soak for twenty-four hours a fine piece of salt fish. Put it on the fire in sufficient water, carefully taking it off when it begins to boil. Put butter, oil, parsley and garlic into a stewpan upon a gentle fire. In the meantime skin the fish and divide it into small bits. Put the pieces into the stewpan, and add from time to time more oil, butter or milk, as the whole is perceived to thicken. Shake the stewpan for a long time over the fire, so as to reduce the salt fish to a kind of cream. The receipt is very simple, but we do not cease to repeat that the success of the brandade depends on shaking the stewpan for a very long time. This alone can effect the extreme division or disunion of all the parts of the naturally tough fish and metamorphose it into a sort of cream." It may be a dreadful heresy, but it is difficult not to add Braze that there is an effective instrument called a spoon which is not once mentioned in the foregoing sentences, and which if properly stirred would save a good deal of shaking. Let it be furthermore added, that though Grimod dwells in his usual emphatic way on the creamy nature of a brandade, it is by no means to be classed with spoon meat-it is a very thick cream to be heaped on the dish with fried crusts round it.
Grimod's method is sound but assumes salt cod, an unhurried fire, and a cook willing to work the pan for half an hour. A few points bring it into a modern kitchen.
- The hinge: emulsion, not mashingThe long shaking is not superstition. It is an emulsification of oil and milk into the fish fibres, exactly as in mayonnaise or aioli, and it fails if the fat goes in too fast or the pan gets too hot. Add oil and warm milk in small additions, and keep the pan barely warm to the touch of the hand.
- "Salt fish" means salt codBrandade is made with morue, dry salt cod, and that is almost certainly what is meant here, though Kettner's text says only "salt fish". Buy thick centre-cut loin rather than thin tail pieces, which are mostly skin and bone. Modern lightly salted or frozen "bacalao" needs far less soaking than a hard-dried board of it.
- Soaking and the twenty-four hoursTwenty-four hours in several changes of cold water, in the refrigerator, suits genuinely hard-cured fish. Taste a sliver of raw flesh before cooking: it should read as seasoned, not saline. Under-soaked cod makes a brandade nobody can eat.
- "Taking it off when it begins to boil"This is deliberate. Salt cod poached at a boil turns stringy and tough, which is precisely the texture the shaking is meant to defeat. Bring the water to a bare shiver, slide the pan off, and let the fish stand ten minutes or so until it flakes.
- Quantities, which the original omitsA workable ratio for 1 lb of soaked cod is about 1 cup of olive oil and 1/2 to 3/4 cup of milk, warmed, plus butter, two or three cloves of garlic and a handful of parsley. That serves six as a first course.
- A stewpan is a saucepanA wide, heavy-bottomed saucepan over the lowest heat. A food processor will do the division of the fibres in seconds, but it also breaks the emulsion easily and gives a gluey result if the cod is worked too long; a wooden spoon or a mortar stays closer to Grimod's texture.
- Kettner's point about the spoonHe is right. Vigorous stirring with a spoon does the work of shaking, and the classic Provençal method pounds the fish in a mortar while dribbling in oil.
- ServingNot a soup and not a dip. It should stand in a heaped dome, hot, with fried bread croutons or triangles of bread fried in oil set round the dish.
Grimod de la Reyni" des Gourmands (published 1803-1812), and Kettner is quoting him more or less straight, including the derivation from brandir, to shake or brandish -- a folk etymology that is still the usual explanation, and probably by way of Proven"al brandar. The dish belongs to Languedoc and Provence, and specifically to N"mes, which continues to claim it; the salt cod itself came inland from the Atlantic trade, and by the eighteenth century dried cod was the cheap Lenten protein of a whole Mediterranean region that had never seen a live cod. Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written for a London readership by E. S. Dallas under the Kettner name, and its habit is exactly this: quote the French authority in full, then puncture him. The remark about the spoon is the whole tone of the book in one sentence.