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Bacalao
(Spain.) Soak and parboil 1 pound of salt cod, mix it, in flakes, with 1/2 pint of tomato sauce, made of stewed tomatoes, an onion chopped fine and fried in a tablespoonful of olive oil, a pinch of cinnamon, salt, and pepper. Bake this in an earthen dish with slices of bread and butter over the top.
A straightforward salt cod gratin; the only real work happens before the cooking starts. Judge the soaking by taste, not by the clock.
- Soaking the codModern salt cod is usually bone-dry and heavily salted: 24-36 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, changed three or four times, is normal for a thick loin piece. Taste a sliver before you proceed; if it still stings with salt, keep soaking, since nothing later in the recipe will rescue it.
- "Parboil" means barely poachBring the soaked fish to a bare simmer in fresh water and hold it 8-10 minutes at most, until it flakes. Salt cod that actually boils turns fibrous and stringy, and it will be cooked again in the oven.
- Half a pint of sauceAn American half-pint is one cup, which is right for a pound of fish. If your stewed tomatoes are watery, reduce the sauce until it mounds on a spoon, or the finished dish will be soupy under the bread.
- Stewed tomatoesTomatoes cooked down, tinned or fresh. A 14-15 oz tin of chopped tomatoes, simmered with the fried onion until thick, gives the intended texture.
- The cinnamonA pinch means a pinch. It is there as a background warmth in the Spanish manner, not as a flavour you should be able to name.
- Salt last, if at allThe instruction to salt the sauce is written for cod that has been soaked to blandness. Season the sauce only after you have mixed in the fish and tasted.
- Earthen dish and ovenAny shallow gratin dish or small casserole works. The recipe gives no temperature; 350F for 20-25 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edge, will do it, and you can run it briefly under the broiler if the bread has not browned.
- YieldA pound of dried cod feeds three or four as a main course with a green salad or braised greens.
Bacalao is simply the Spanish word for cod, and by extension for the salt-dried cod that has been a staple of Iberian cooking since Basque fleets worked the North Atlantic banks, securely documented from the sixteenth century. Salting and drying made the fish shelf-stable and portable, which suited both long voyages and the many meatless days of the Catholic calendar; Spain and Portugal remain among the largest consumers of a fish their own waters never supplied in quantity. Tomato, onion, olive oil and a whisper of cinnamon is a thoroughly Spanish combination, the cinnamon often said to be a lingering trace of medieval Moorish seasoning that survives in Spanish savoury cooking long after it faded from northern European kitchens. Recipes of this kind appear in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks as short national sketches, meant to give a home cook a taste of foreign travel without leaving the kitchen, which is exactly the conceit of a book titled with a saucepan over the sea.