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Codfish Soup (Zuppa di Merluzzo)
Take one-half pound of salt codfish that has been soaked, cut it up into squares, but not small.
Prepare in a saucepan four tablespoons of good olive-oil, and one small onion cut into pieces. Cook the onion in the oil over a slow fire, without allowing the onion to become colored, then add a small bunch of parsley steams, a small piece of celery, a bay-leaf, and a small sprig of thyme. Cool for a few moments, then add two tomatoes, skinned and with the seeds removed, and cut into slices, two tablespoons of dry white wine, and one medium-sized potato, peeled and cut into slices, and, lastly, one cup of water. When the potato is half cooked, add the codfish, then one-half tablespoon more of olive-oil. Remove the parsley stems, and put in instead one-half tablespoon of chopped-up parsley; add a good pinch of pepper, and some salt, if needed. When the vegetables are thoroughly cooked pour the soup over pieces of toasted or fried bread, and serve.
A small, plainly built fish soup that depends almost entirely on how you treat the salt cod. Two typographical slips in the original are worth sorting out before you start.
- Soak the cod properly"Salt codfish that has been soaked" means 24-48 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, with the water changed three or four times. Under-soaked baccala will make the whole pot inedibly salty, and no amount of potato will rescue it.
- Two misprintsTwo likely misprints -- "Parsley steams" is plainly parsley stems, and "Cool for a few moments" is very probably "Cook for a few moments", since the herbs are meant to sweat briefly in the oil rather than to cool down.
- Slow fireMedium-low on a modern burner. The point is to soften the onion without browning it; colour here brings a sweetness that fights the salt fish.
- The liquid is very shortOne cup of water plus two tablespoons of wine gives a thick, almost stewy zuppa rather than a broth — correct for the style, since it is poured over bread that soaks up most of it. If you want something spoonable in a bowl, go to two cups and adjust the salt at the end.
- Salt last, if at allThe instruction to add salt "if needed" is not a formality. Taste only after the cod has cooked, and expect to need none.
- Timing the fishSalt cod in squares needs roughly 8-10 minutes; it is done when it flakes at the edges. Adding it when the potato is half cooked works out, but if the potato is lagging, hold the fish back — long cooking turns it stringy.
- The finishing oil and parsleyThe recipe adds the extra half tablespoon of oil and the chopped parsley while the vegetables are still finishing, but if you want them chiefly for aroma, add them off the heat or nearly so.
- Yield and breadHalf a pound of cod feeds two generously, three modestly. Use a sturdy country loaf, sliced thick, toasted dry or fried in olive oil, and put it in the bowl before the soup.
Salt cod reached Italian kitchens from the North Atlantic fisheries and became a fixture precisely because it kept: dried and salted, it could travel inland and sit in a pantry, which made it the standard fish for meatless days on the Catholic calendar in regions that never saw the sea. Merluzzo is the Italian word for cod, and in practice the preserved form is more often called baccala (salted) or stoccafisso (air-dried). The construction here — a bundle of herbs, tomato, wine, potato, and bread in the bottom of the bowl — is the common frame for a great many southern and central Italian soups, with the bread doing the work that pasta or rice would do elsewhere. Simple Italian Cookery was published in 1912 under the pen name Antonia Isola, and belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century books written to introduce American households to Italian cooking in quantities and terms they could manage.