Google has already celebrated his birthday today with a personalized doodle. I wonder what he might think of the tribute and the way it’s displayed.

If Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, were still alive today he would be 225 years old. I’m not sure he would appreciate all in our present world. But who knows? With Schopenhauer one can be never sure…

I tend  never to speak about my little irrelevant personal matters in my blog, because I’m aware it would not be of any interest. They are not necessarily interesting for myself either.

Nevertheless, when I think of Schopenhauer, I cannot help thinking of my best friend, who is a great admirer of his philosophical wisdom.

My best friend, Sergey, never got married. He told me that when he was 21 he had decided to get married and he had already organized everything. The night before the wedding he didn’t felt like sleeping and remained up all the night reading Schopenhauer. Early in the morning he had understood what he had to do.

So he went to see her fiancée and explained her that Schopenhauer had made him understand that he was not made for marriage.

The girl was probably not too happy at the very beginning, so he remained with her to cheer her up for a couple of day, reading Schopenhauer also to her. At the end it seems she was persuaded as well and she thought it was really the best decision.

Later she got married to someone else and everybody was much happier.

33 years have passed since that day, but Sergey is still grateful to Schopenhauer.

Arthurs Schopenhauer was lucky enough to have the serene death we would all choose if we could.

He died quickly and peacefully on his couch, while he was reading with his cat on his knees.

He was 72 years old.

Translation from a language to another one  are always rich of tricks and traps, not only in literature, but even more when we come to speak of gastronomy and cookery. After this necessary disclaimer I can keep on, relying on my few readers’ tolerance and on their effort to imagine what I really mean to say.

This is a typical Venetian recipe, which I have tasted many times in those so peculiar little cafés in Venice where they serve little snacks with a glass of white wine as aperitif.

Unfortunately these wonderful and a little secluded places are disappearing one of the other, because Venice itself is disappearing to become something else. But this will be pehaps another topic to treat in future.

Today we’ll speak only of a cooking recipe.

For whimsical reason I cannot explain and in all cases would not be interesting to explain, I decided to prepare Baccalà mantecato by myself.

The first obstacle was finding here in Switzerland the suitable dried salt cod, since it’s not exactly the most common food over here. But I managed successfully.

Then I started the perilous and long preparation. I desalted the cod; it took 24 hours (the minimum). The dried fish had to be put into cold fresh water which had to be changed every 5 hours.

When this part of the procedure was done, I could boil it in a mixture of water and milk for about 35 minutes, until it was soft and tender. Then I took away manually all the skin and the fish bones. Finally I started the real preparation of the dish, which consists in pounding and crushing the fish energetically with a wooden spoon. One must not use a mixer or any other modern household appliance, food processors and similar…Anathema! The fish must keep its texture it must not be transformed in a sort of homogenized baby-food. Then I started adding little by little a little of pure extra-virgin olive oil, beating the fish with it as if I made a mayonnaise sauce. Actually ii becomes shiny and whiter and creamy like a real kind of mayonnaise, keeping nevertheless is texture. At the end I added a generous dose of pepper and minced parsley and a little, very little garlic

It’s excellent to eat, at room temperature, spread on a warm grilled slice of rustic bread or with polenta.

Now maybe one might wonder how it happened that a dried fish   from Baltic Sea had been adopted as main ingredient for a typical Venetian recipe (speaking in general of Italian cooking is nonsense. In Italy recipes are basically quite different from region to region)-

Many events, if not all, in history are based on chance. In 1432 a Venetian nobleman, Piero Querini, was shipwrecked in Røst, in northern Norway.

 He happily survived to that dramatic accident and, considering that it happened in winter, he was really lucky.

 Of course Piero remained grounded there for a rather long time, before getting another ship to come back to his homeland, so he had time to get familiar with local tradition and was very intrigued by the habit local people had to conserve fish for long time with that technique. When he arrived back to Venice, he took with him  a good quantity of  dried salted cod and Italian merchants started bartering that northern fish with other good as fabrics, favouring the diffusion of fish in the  inland areas  where there is not any sea.

The success of dried fish was increased by …religious reasons! About one century after Piero Querini’s shipwreck the Roman Catholic Church held an ecumenical council in Trento (I refuse to bore my two or three reader with detailed description of this event) and among the huge number of precepts and doctrinal statements, it was also decided  that a series of rules would have imposed on the  faithful Catholics the obligation of abstaining from meat in certain specific days, but the fish was accepted. People found easily a way to conjugate rich and good cooking with the absence of meat, exploiting all the possibilities offered by fish together with many ingredients.

So Northern dried salt cod from Baltic Sea became a tradition in Italian cooking.