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Codfish with Green Peppers
Take one-half pound of salted codfish which has been soaked to remove the saltiness. Remove the skin and bones, and cut the codfish into small squares. Then dip it again into fresh water, and put the squares onto a napkin to dry. The fish may either be left as it is, or before proceeding, you may roll it in flour and fry it in lard or oil.
Then take two good-sized green peppers, roast them on top of the stove, remove the skins and seeds, wash them, dry them, and cut them in narrow strips. When this is done put three generous tablespoons of olive-oil into a saucepan with one onion cut up small, and fry the onion over a slow fire. Take two big tomatoes, skin them, remove the seeds and hard parts, and cut them into small pieces. When the onion has taken a good color, add the tomatoes, and cook until they sputter, then add the peppers and a little salt and pepper. If the sauce is too thick add a little water. When the peppers are half cooked, add some chopped-up parsley and the codfish. Cover up the saucepan and let it simmer until the fish is cooked. This dish is also good cold.
A straightforward Neapolitan-style braise of salt cod in a pepper and tomato sauce. Almost everything depends on how well the fish is desalted before it goes near the pan.
- Soaking the cod"Soaked to remove the saltiness" means 24 to 48 hours in the refrigerator in plenty of cold water, changed three or four times. Thick centre-cut pieces need the full two days; taste a sliver raw at the end, and if it is still aggressively salty keep going.
- Which salt cod to buyLook for pale, thick, dry-salted fillets rather than the wet, boxed, pre-cut kind, which is often heavily salted and sometimes partly rehydrated already. Half a pound of dry fish will swell noticeably as it soaks.
- Salt at the end, not the startThe recipe adds "a little salt and pepper" to the sauce before the fish goes in. Add none at that stage. Season only after the cod has simmered and given up its own salt to the sauce.
- Roasting the peppers"Roast them on top of the stove" means directly on a gas flame or on a very hot dry pan or grill until the skins blister black, then covered for ten minutes to loosen the skin. Under a broiler at high heat takes about 10-15 minutes with turning.
- Rinsing the peppersThe instruction to wash and dry the peeled peppers removes stray char and seeds. Do it quickly under a light stream of water and pat dry, or the strips will thin the sauce.
- Frying the fishThe optional flour-and-fry step gives a firmer texture and a little body to the sauce. Either fat works; the recipe allows lard or oil, and olive oil gives a lighter result. Fry only until pale gold, since the pieces finish in the sauce.
- TomatoesTwo big tomatoes is somewhere around 14-16 oz of ripe fruit. Out of season, use about 1 cup of drained canned plum tomatoes, crushed. "Cook until they sputter" probably describes the point where the tomatoes have given up their water and begin to sizzle in the oil rather than boil; expect several minutes.
- Simmering timeSalt cod is cooked through in 10 to 15 minutes of gentle simmering and turns dry and stringy if pushed further. Keep the heat low and stop as soon as the pieces flake under a fork.
- Yield and servingHalf a pound of dry fish serves two generously or three as part of a larger meal. Good warm with bread, and genuinely better cold the next day, as the original notes, when the oil and pepper flavours have settled.
Salt cod is the great paradox of Italian cooking: a fish from the cold North Atlantic that became a fixture of Mediterranean kitchens, carried south by Basque, Portuguese, English and Scandinavian traders from the late Middle Ages onward. It was cheap, it kept without ice, and above all it was permissible on the many lean days of the Church calendar, which made it as much a Friday and Lenten staple in inland Italy as fresh fish was on the coast. This particular combination of baccalà with roasted peppers, tomato, onion and parsley belongs to the southern repertoire, where peppers and tomatoes arrived from the Americas and were absorbed so thoroughly that by the nineteenth century they defined the region's cooking. Books of simple Italian cookery aimed at English-speaking readers around the turn of the twentieth century seem often to have favoured dishes of this kind: few ingredients, one pan, and a pantry fish that any grocer stocked.