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Fried Codfish
(Baccalà fritto) Place the codfish on the fire-after washing as explained in No. 107-in a kettle with cold water and as salt, and as soon as the water boils, remove the codfish.
After boiling cut it in little pieces and remove all the bones. Sprinkle some flour and dip in a frying paste composed of water, flour and a little oil. Fry in oil and serve hot. 125
A plain Italian fritto of salt cod in a light batter. The recipe assumes you already know how salt cod is handled, which is the part most modern cooks need spelled out.
- Start with proper soakingBaccalà is bone-dry, hard-salted cod, and the cross-reference to "No. 107" stands in for a soak the text never repeats. Refrigerate the fish in a large volume of cold water for 24 to 48 hours depending on thickness, changing the water three or four times, until a corner tastes seasoned rather than saline. Salt cod sold pre-soaked or frozen at fishmongers needs only a rinse.
- The garbled line about salt"with cold water and as salt" is evidently a printing error; the likeliest reading is cold water and no salt, which is how salt cod is normally freshened. Either way, do not add any to the pot, and do not salt the batter until you have tasted the cooked fish.
- Off the heat the moment it boilsThe instruction is to remove the cod as soon as the water reaches a boil. Salt cod is already firm, and a real simmer will shred it. Bring it up slowly from cold and pull it out at the first break of bubbles, then let it drain and cool enough to handle.
- BoningBelly and loin cuts carry a line of pin bones and often the skin. Both come away easily once the fish has been warmed through and cooled slightly, and it is worth going over each piece with your fingers rather than trusting a look.
- The pastellaWater, flour and a little oil makes a lean tempura-style batter, not a beer batter. Roughly 1 cup flour, 3/4 to 1 cup cold water and a tablespoon of olive oil, whisked to the consistency of heavy cream; rest it 20 minutes. The preliminary dusting of dry flour is what makes it cling.
- Frying oil and temperatureThe recipe says only "fry in oil"; olive oil is a likely reading for an Italian book, though any neutral oil works. Use a generous depth, hold it at 350-375F, fry in batches so the temperature does not crash, and turn once; two to three minutes a side is enough for pieces the size of a matchbox.
- Yield and servingA pound of soaked salt cod feeds three or four as a second course. Serve immediately with lemon. Fried baccala is widely associated with Christmas Eve and with meatless Fridays in Italy, and is often served with other fried items rather than a sauce.
Baccala is Atlantic cod salted and dried, a trade good that reached the Mediterranean from the North Atlantic fisheries and became a fixture of Italian cooking because it kept without ice and suited the many meatless days of the Catholic calendar. Landlocked regions ate it as readily as coastal ones, which is why versions of it turn up from Vicenza to Naples to Sicily, each with its own treatment. This particular book, Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book of 1919, was written for American readers at a moment when Italian immigrant cooking was becoming visible in the United States, and its terse style assumes a cook already familiar with salt cod. The frying batter of nothing but flour, water and oil is a leaner mixture than the egg-enriched pastelle found in other cookbooks.