Dgourmac's Blog

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!

After making the beet ravioli, I still had some fresh pasta sheets available, so I decided to make linguine with it, and do some sort of a mushroom sauce. A bit of research in my recipe files turned up this Mushroom Ragoût by Martha Rose Shulman, which looked quite promising.

I had a small quantity of high quality (and expensive) fresh mushrooms from Eataly Boston. They included a handful of lovely chanterelles and a few fresh morels, and they needed to be used right away. I cut those up, along with white button mushrooms and Shiitakes.

The Ragoût calls for dried wild mushrooms to supplement the fresh ones. Fortunately, I have a cabinet full of choices available, based on some purchases made over the past year, when fresh mushrooms were out-of-season.

The dried mushrooms get washed and then rehydrated in warm or hot water. After removing them from the soaking water, the mushrooms are coarsely chopped. The soaking water is then strained once or twice through a fine-mesh sieve to remove grit and sand. That liquid has an intense, woodsy aroma, and it makes beautiful sauces, with a little help from sautéed onions and garlic.

The finished ragoût was heated and tossed in generous amounts with the linguine, topped with freshly-ground Pecorino, olive oil and chopped parsley. Colors and smells were outstanding, ably assisted by a glass of Chenin Blanc from Birichino. Altogether, there were about 10 different kinds of wild mushrooms in this meal. That diversity made the dish rich — bursting with flavor and textures.

The full name for this dish is Casunziei all’Ampezzana. It is a hearty beet-filled ravioli, originating in the mountains of what is now northern Italy. This region (the Dolomites) were part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire until the end of World War I, when it became part of Italy.

Why in the world would I make that, since so much of my focus for food and wine is in Southern Italy, not the North? The answers, my friends, are straightforward: it is (1) unusual, (2) delicious, (3) makes good use of beets I have already cooked, and (4) I found an excellent video explaining how to make it.

I had plenty of time yesterday afternoon to play around with this, so I happily launched into preparing it as a first course for dinner, to be followed by a second course of sautéed shrimp with garlic and vegetables. The only adjustments I made to Frankie’s recipe was to make the pasta with egg, instead of just water, and to use a bit of Sicilian marmalade, since I did not have a fresh orange to use for the zest.

If you notice the details in his recipe, he neglected to show the addition of poppy seeds — a signature part of this cuisine — so I forgot to put it into the sauce, in spite of what he shows in the video. The meal came together nicely, and the wine — Birichino’s 2022 Blanc de Noir of Cinsault — provided an important and flavorful part of the dinner. Next time I will remember the poppy seeds.

One of my more unusual cookbooks is The Geometry of Pasta. Here is a quote from the NPR review of the book, when it was published in 2010:

“Pasta comes in a myriad of wonderful shapes — tubes and spirals, shells and ribbons and little ears. But why? Did some pasta manufacturer have fun — or does it really make a difference in taste?“

The authors address these questions with intriguing explanations, and they illustrate them with over 100 recipes. I had read the book cover-to-cover years ago but until recently, I tried only a few of the recipes. This week I have delved into several more recipes, beginning with this Sardinian pasta with Manila Clams from the State of Washington, by way of Eataly Boston’s fish market.

As you can see, this is a fairly simple recipe, and I found the instructions to be accurate. It made a lovely late lunch for me today, and I’m happy to share the results with you.

I had a little bit of the Ancarani Fomoso left, to go with the first serving. The second helping was accompanied by the latest Vermentino from Birichino.

Now that I’m mostly caught up with blog entries for my fans, I will close out the Spring season with a brief selection of tasty and attractive dishes. None of these were important enough for a full story, but I can’t let them go by without being noticed.

Red Cabbage and Beet Salad with Balsamic Vinegar

Couscous, Vegetables and Feta Cheese Salad

Asparagus and Pancetta Quiche

Padron Peppers with Sopressata with Slovenian Orange Wine

Sheet Pan Roasted Vegetables with Feta

Pasta Fagioli with Borlotti Beans

Spaghetti with Pan Roasted Pancetta and Pecorino

They tasted at least as good as they looked.