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Codfish with Egg Sauce
Take one pound of salt codfish. Boil it and remove the skin and bones. Then fry lightly in butter, adding chopped-up parsley, salt, and pepper. Stir about constantly, and add from time to time a little boiling water, until the fish is thoroughly cooked. Then beat up the yolks of two eggs and add them with a little flour, and cook for a few moments more. Squeeze on some lemon juice and serve.
Codfish "alla Marinaia" Take one pound of salt codfish. Boil slightly until you can remove the skin and bones. Chop up fine a piece of onion, and parsley, and fry them in a saucepan with three tablespoons of best olive-oil, then put in the codfish with salt, pepper, and a pinch of allspice. While this is cooking, put into another saucepan three tablespoons of best vinegar, two tablespoons of fish broth, and one-half bay-leaf. Add a little flour to give body to the sauce, stir well, then remove the bay-leaf, and take the saucepan off the fire. Arrange the platter with pieces of fried bread in a layer on the bottom, then the codfish, and then the sauce poured over it.
Fresh Codfish "al Vino Bianco" Remove the bones from three-quarters of a pound of fresh codfish. Cut into slices lengthwise. Butter a baking-dish, put in the fish, put more butter on top of it, salt and pepper, and one-half glass of dry white wine. Cook for twenty minutes in a hot oven, then place the fish on a platter, take the juice left over in the baking-dish, put it into a saucepan, add a little flour, some more butter, and the juice of half a lemon. Before taking off the fire, add some chopped-up parsley, and then pour the sauce over the fish, and serve.
Three codfish preparations run together here: two using baccalà (salt cod) and one using fresh fish. The first thing to know is that the book assumes you already soaked the salt cod, because everyone did.
- Soak the salt cod firstNeither salt recipe mentions it, but hard-dried baccalà needs 24-48 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, with the water changed three or four times. Skip this and the dish is inedibly salty no matter how well you cook it. Modern lightly-salted or frozen-desalted cod may need only overnight.
- "Boil it" means poach itSalt cod turns stringy at a rolling boil. Bring it to a bare simmer, hold it 10-15 minutes until the flakes separate, and lift it out. The first recipe's later frying and steaming with boiling water finishes the cooking.
- Hold back the saltAll three recipes call for salt. With properly soaked baccalà, add none until you have tasted the finished dish; the cod will usually carry enough.
- The egg yolks are a thickener, not a scrambleBeat the two yolks with the flour and a spoonful of the hot pan liquid first, then stir the mixture in off the direct heat and cook it gently for a minute. Added straight to a hot pan they will curdle into threads.
- "A hot oven"For the fresh cod in white wine, read this as roughly 400-450F. Twenty minutes suits thick slices from a large fish; thin fillets will be done sooner, at the point where the flesh flakes readily (commonly cited guidance for fish is an internal 145F).
- "Half a glass" of wineA glass in Italian cooking of this sort is usually taken to mean an ordinary table tumbler, on the order of 6-8 fl oz, which would make half a glass somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 cup. Use a dry white you would drink.
- Flour in the saucesEach sauce is finished with "a little flour." A scant teaspoon per half cup of liquid is about right; whisk it into the butter or a little cold liquid before it meets the hot pan, or the sauce will be lumpy.
- Fish brothThe alla marinaia sauce wants two tablespoons of fish broth. The strained poaching water from the cod itself will do, provided the fish was properly desalted.
- YieldA pound of salt cod, once soaked, feeds three as a main course or four as part of a larger meal. The three-quarter pound of fresh cod serves two.
Baccalà is one of the great paradoxes of Italian cooking: an Atlantic fish, salted and dried on Northern European coasts, that became a fixture from Venice to Naples because it kept for long periods and could be carried inland. It was above all a Lenten and Friday food, cheap protein for the many meatless days on the Catholic calendar, and many regions developed their own treatment. The second recipe here, "alla marinaia" — in the sailor's manner — is a version of the vinegar-and-bay sauces found up and down the coast, poured over fried bread to soak up the liquid. That the book gives fresh cod its own short recipe in white wine and butter, with no mention of soaking or salt, marks the difference between the everyday store-cupboard fish and the fish bought fresh.