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Baccalà mantecato (Creamed dried salt cod)

1/2/2013

4 Comments

 
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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.


4 Comments
Curt Gates
1/2/2013 08:47:09 am

I read this aloud to my wife because it brought back childhood memories of life on the New England coastline and salt cod that came in little wooden boxes. Even with fresh fish available, the affordable salt cod had its place during hard economic times. I understand it was also a staple in trade with Caribbean islands centuries ago. Fascinating topic!!!!

Reply
Barry
11/2/2013 02:52:07 pm

A most interesting historical account. We are losing a lot of culture with modern preserving techniques (tinned and refrigerated foods!). A well cooked fish is a delight to eat.

Reply
mr blizzard
29/3/2013 06:59:20 am

excellent thnaks for shareing

Reply
Juliana link
26/2/2021 07:16:23 am

Goood share

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    I'm the author of all the soap bubbles of thoughts, which are floating in this nearly private space.
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    Marisa Livet and I cannot speak of myself in third person, because it would sound definitely too ridiculous.
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