Home › Fish and Shellfish › Codfish Croquettes
Codfish Croquettes
(Cotolette di baccalà) Boil as explained above and, if the quantity is one pound or a little more put together two anchovies and some parsley, chopping everything together very fine. Add some pepper, a tablespoonful of grated cheese, three or four tablespoonfuls of pap, composed of bread crumbs in large pieces, water and butter, and two eggs.
Give the compound the form of several flat cutlets, dip them in beaten egg and in ground bread crumbs. Fry in oil and serve with lemon, or tomato sauce. 126
A panada-bound salt cod cake from a book that assumes you already know how to handle baccalà. The soaking is the part the recipe leaves out, because the preceding entry covered it.
- "Boil as explained above"Dried salt cod must be soaked before it goes near heat: 24 to 48 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, changed three or four times, until a corner tastes pleasantly salty rather than harsh. Then poach it gently below a simmer for 10-15 minutes; hard boiling shreds it and toughens the flakes. Pre-soaked wet salt cod from a fishmonger needs only a few hours' refresh.
- "Pap"This is a panada — torn bread (crusts off, in large pieces as stated), moistened with water and enriched with butter, mashed to a paste. Three or four tablespoons for a pound of fish. Stale white bread works; fresh bread turns gluey.
- AnchoviesTwo anchovies, salted or oil-packed; a whole salted anchovy yields two fillets, so read this as two small fish rather than two tins. They season the mixture rather than announce themselves as anchovy, and with the cod they supply much of the salt.
- Grated cheeseParmigiano or grana. A tablespoon, as the recipe specifies, is enough; the fish is already salty.
- Binding and chillingTwo eggs in the mixture plus more for the coating. Once mixed, chill the mass 30 minutes before shaping; cold cakes hold their shape in the pan and absorb less oil.
- FryingShallow-fry in olive or a neutral oil, hot but not smoking, two or three minutes a side, until the crumb is deep gold. "Cutlets" here means the flat shape the recipe calls for, not balls.
- Salt, lastTaste the raw mixture for salt only after the soaked cod is cooked and flaked. Depending on how long it soaked, it may need none at all.
- YieldA pound of soaked cod with the panada should make something like eight cakes, enough for four as a main course with lemon or more as an antipasto.
Baccalà — cod split and salted, mainly in Norway and Newfoundland — became an Italian staple not because Italy fished cod but because the Church prescribed fish on Fridays, on the vigils of feasts, and through Lent, and salt cod was the one sea fish that could reach Milan or Naples or a hill village in Abruzzo without ice. By the nineteenth century every region had its own treatment: Vicenza stewed it in milk, Rome fried it in batter, Liguria pounded it with potato. Croquettes like these belong to the frugal end of that tradition, where a modest amount of fish is stretched with bread and egg. The book itself, published in the United States around 1919 and often said to draw on Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina, has a terse cross-reference to a previous recipe ("boil as explained above") that is characteristic of a book that expected to be read straight through rather than dipped into.