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Codfish, Brandade Style
1 pound salt codfish 1 diced potato 2 tablespoons olive-oil 1 cup milk Salt and pepper 3 tablespoons lemon-juice Soak the codfish overnight, then put it in a saucepan of cold water, add the potato and cook on a quick fire. When it is on the point of boiling, remove it to the edge of the stove and cook on a slow fire, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. Add the oil, drop by drop, and the milk. When it thickens it has been cooked long enough. Add the salt, pepper and lemon-juice, and serve hot.
A stovetop emulsion of salt cod, potato and olive oil, written for a coal range where you controlled heat by moving the pan rather than turning a dial. Nearly all the difficulty is in the heat management and the rate at which the oil goes in.
- The hinge: never let it boil"On the point of boiling, remove it to the edge of the stove" means the mixture should stay just below a simmer for the whole enrichment stage. On a gas or electric hob that is low heat, and a heavy pan helps. Boiling breaks the emulsion and toughens the cod into threads.
- Soaking the codOvernight is the minimum for a thick piece of salt cod; with modern heavily salted salt cod, 24 to 36 hours in the refrigerator with three or four changes of cold water is safer. Taste a sliver of the soaked flesh before cooking — if it is still sharply salty, keep soaking.
- "A quick fire"High heat, only long enough to bring the pot up to temperature. Once it approaches the boil the heat drops for the rest of the cooking.
- The cooking waterThe recipe never says to drain, and the finished dish is meant to be thick rather than soupy. Use only enough cold water to barely cover the fish and potato, and pour off most of it before you begin adding oil and milk, keeping a little in reserve to loosen the paste if it stiffens.
- Adding the oilDrop by drop is not decoration. The oil is being emulsified into the warm fish and starch the way it would be into a mayonnaise; adding it in a stream will leave the dish greasy and separated. Warm the milk before it goes in, for the same reason.
- Salt and the wooden spoonSeason only at the end, as instructed, and taste first — well-soaked cod still carries salt. The wooden spoon matters because the mixture wants working against the side of the pan to shred the fish; a whisk will not do it.
- Yield and servingA pound of salt cod makes enough for four as a first course. Serve hot with toasted bread or croutons fried in olive oil, a common accompaniment in its home region.
Brandade de morue belongs to Provence and the Languedoc, and is most closely associated with Nîmes, where salt cod arrived by trade and was pounded with olive oil into a paste. The name is generally traced to the Provençal verb brandar, to stir or agitate, describing the constant beating that emulsifies the fish with the oil — which is why this version insists on the wooden spoon and the slow fire. Whether potato belongs in it has been argued for well over a century; purists in Nîmes say no, while the potato-thickened version spread widely and from there into English-language collections like this one. Salt cod itself is the reason the dish exists at all: cured and dried, it travelled inland and kept through Lent.