No. 1142

Salt Codfish, Spanish Style

Morue Salee a l'Espagnole

Cut pieces of salt codfish two inches long by one wide; soak them for eighteen hours, changing the water three times. Fry in one gill of oil to a golden color, three cloves of garlic, and three tablespoonfuls of chopped onions; drain off the oil, and add two bay leaves, thyme, whole pepper, two gills of vinegar and one gill of water, also some sweet Spanish peppers, the codfish and half a bottle of white wine; have this remain near the boiling point until thoroughly cooked, pass the stock through a sieve, put it back with the codfish, season to taste with nutmeg and pepper, then thicken with bread-crumbs soaked in water and well pressed out. Have prepared small stuffed tomatoes and round, hollow croutons of bread fried in oil; dress the fish in the center of a dish, and surround with the tomatoes placed on top of the croutons.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's method is a salt cod escabeche: the fish poaches in a sharp vinegar-and-wine liquor that is then strained, returned, and bound with soaked bread. Two things decide whether it works — a long enough soak and a liquid that never actually boils.

Gills and bottlesA gill is half a cup. So one gill of oil is 1/2 cup, two gills of vinegar is 1 cup, and half a bottle of white wine is about 12 oz (1 1/2 cups). Because the frying oil is poured off, the actual cooking liquor comes to roughly three cups; the recipe never says how much codfish to use.
The soak is not optionalEighteen hours with three changes of cold water is the right order of magnitude for traditional hard-dried, heavily salted cod. Modern wet-salted fillets from the fish counter are far less saline and are usually done in 8-12 hours. Taste a raw sliver near the end of the soak; it should read seasoned, not briny. Keep it refrigerated throughout.
"Near the boiling point"This means a bare simmer just below boiling, with barely a tremble on the surface. Salt cod that reaches a rolling boil sheds its flakes into the liquor and turns stringy. Two-inch pieces will cook through in a short time at that heat; the recipe asks only that they be thoroughly cooked.
Sweet Spanish peppersRanhofer most likely means sweet red peppers of the pimiento type rather than hot chiles; he does not specify fresh, dried or preserved. Jarred piquillos or Spanish canned pimientos are the closest thing on a modern shelf; a spoonful of pimentón dulce reinforces the flavour but will not give the same soft strips of flesh.
Drain the frying oilThe garlic and onion are fried in oil that is then poured off, so the finished sauce is lean and acidic rather than rich. Do not skip this step out of thrift — leaving the half cup of oil in turns the dish into an oily braise and the vinegar will not read cleanly.
Thickening with breadCrustless white bread soaked in water and squeezed hard, then whisked into the strained hot liquor, gives a light body somewhere between a sauce and a purée. Start with about a cup of pressed crumb per quart of liquid and add more only after it has had a minute to swell.
The vinegar is assertiveA cup of vinegar to a cup and a half of wine is sharper than most modern palates expect. Use a mild wine vinegar rather than distilled, and if you want it gentler, cut the vinegar and make up the volume with water — the dish is meant to be piquant, not searing.
Croutons and tomatoesThe croutons are rounds of bread hollowed slightly into cups and fried in oil, each holding a small stuffed tomato. Fry them shortly before serving and assemble at the last moment; they go soggy quickly against the sauce.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled during his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where recipes were numbered like a catalogue. Salt cod in a vinegar, wine and sweet-pepper liquor belongs to the Iberian escabeche family — a preservation technique generally traced to the Arab-influenced cooking of medieval Spain, in which fried or poached fish is held in an acidulated marinade — and Ranhofer's "à l'Espagnole" label is doing the work of signalling garlic, oil and pimiento to a New York dining room. Salt cod itself was one of the great commodities of the Atlantic world, dried on the banks of Newfoundland and shipped to Catholic Europe and the Caribbean, which is why a luxury American restaurant could treat a preserved fish as a legitimate menu item rather than penance food. The garnish of hollowed fried croutons holding stuffed tomatoes is pure Delmonico's: a plain peasant stew given an architectural border so it could be carried into a formal dining room.