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Codfish, Brandade Style
1 pound salt codfish
1 cup milk
I diced potato
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons olive-oil
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 stripped-down brandade — salt cod worked with oil and milk into a warm paste. The recipe assumes a coal range with hot and cool zones, and it assumes you know that salt cod must be tamed before it goes near a pan.
- The soak is the whole dishOvernight is the minimum for a thick salt-cod fillet, and the water is usually changed several times during it, though this recipe does not say so. Under-soaked cod will be inedibly salty no matter what you do later; note that the recipe holds the salt back to the very end.
- "Quick fire" and "slow fire"Quick fire means the hottest part of the range — full heat on a modern burner. The "edge of the stove" is the cool margin of a cast-iron range top, equivalent to your lowest setting or a diffuser.
- Do not let it boilThe instruction to pull it off the moment it approaches a boil is the hinge. Salt cod that boils turns stringy and tough, and the oil-and-milk emulsion will split rather than thicken.
- Drain and flake firstThe text is compressed here. In practice you poach the cod and potato until the fish flakes, drain off nearly all the cooking water, and pick out skin and any pin bones before you begin working in the oil. Left swimming in liquid it will never thicken.
- Oil drop by dropThis is a mayonnaise technique — the oil is being emulsified into the warm fish, and adding it in a stream will break it. Warm the milk before adding it for the same reason.
- The potatoOne diced potato for a pound of cod is a binder and a moderator of saltiness, not a bulk filler. A floury variety breaks down and thickens; a waxy one stays in lumps.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a pound of dry salt cod would stretch to roughly four to six as a first course. Serve it hot with toast or fried bread, as the French do; it stiffens considerably as it cools.
Brandade de morue belongs to Provence and Languedoc, and Nîmes in particular claims it; the name is generally traced to the Provençal brandar, to stir or pound, which is exactly what the wooden spoon is doing here. The dish depends on the long trade in Atlantic salt cod that carried dried fish deep into the Mediterranean interior, where fresh sea fish never reached — cod is not a Mediterranean species, but salted it kept for months and travelled anywhere. Classic versions beat in olive oil and milk alternately over gentle heat until the mass turns pale and creamy, often with garlic; this version omits the garlic and leans on lemon instead.