This is a short story about a couple of meals I made recently, featuring salt cod. As often happens with me and food, it’s also a story about history, geography, culture, and great food. The specific meals triggering the story were Brandade., and we begin our journey with a fascinating book I read years ago, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky. As an introduction, here are the first three paragraphs of the book.

Making Brandade is a three-day affair. It’s a dish treasured in France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, perhaps originating in Provence. I’ve made this a half-dozen times over the last 15 years, but this time I followed a different recipe — one from Serious Eats, a superb resource online for food recipes and techniques. It was a marked improvement and is now my new standard. Here is the printed version on one page, but I encourage you also to click on the link above, because the full recipe provides excellent photos to guide you through the process.

Why does it take three days? The cod is heavily salted as a preservative, and it will keep for years in the freezer in this form. Fish markets that cater to French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese families usually stock salt cod for their patrons. It normally requires two or three days of washing and soaking the fish in cold water to remove most of the salt and to make it edible.

Over the years I have learned that there is a huge difference in texture and flavor, depending on the country of origin and the producer. Also, some fillets are relatively thin, and others from the loin of the fish are much thicker. Most fillets still have bones in them, but the very best premium portions are boneless — sin espinas in Spanish. My benchmark examples are shown below from my visit to La Boqueria in Barcelona in 2006 and 2014. You can also gauge inflation by comparing the prices shown.

You can see the final product of my efforts in the photos of Brandade in the gratin dish, above. It makes a great appetizer and snack. You can also use it to stuff and roast sweet peppers or tomatoes, and I imagine it would work well in ravioli, too. Here is a recent lunch plate, with Brandade on my sautéed sourdough bread, with a side order of cherry tomatoes and a glass of Birichino rosé. Enjoy!