![]() ![]() There is also pasta with salt cod, pecorino and basil: a dish I almost always choose at a trattoria called Cesare al Casaletto. ![]() Then there is baccalà mantecato: salt cod whipped into a soft pale cream with oil, milk and potatoes, according to Simon Hopkinson’s recipe, and served with triangles of fried bread and a bottle (each) of wine. ![]() My mother-in-law makes bite-sized polpettes from salt cod and refuses to believe us when we tell her how good they are – unlike our local pizzeria who know exactly how enticing their golden curves of battered, fried salt cod are. ![]() Forgetting occasionally pays off – I will never make such a good one again. I tore home to find the contents of the tin had shrunk and its top seized like a well-cooked rice pudding, the edges as crisp and sticky as can be. I was on my second sip of my second Campari when I realised my pocket was no longer ticking! The timer had jammed. I once made his dish, slid it in the oven, then went out for a drink at a nearby bar with an egg timer in my pocket. Alternatively, there is salt cod baked with milk and potatoes – a dish my partner’s uncle, a chef in Livorno, makes well. A favourite way to prepare salt cod comes from the oldest, poorest and tastiest food of Rome – Roman Jewish cooking – fillets simmered in rich tomato sauce, possibly with raisins and pine nuts, a dish that demands a thick piece of bread or garlic-rubbed toast and a glass of red wine. Salting changes the nature of fish, so even when excess salt is rinsed away, the fish has a firm and distinctive texture, a fortified and particularly tasty version of itself. Lina is known for her soaking and you need to get there early on a Friday, as there is often a scrabble for the last fat fillet. She prefers to sit the fillets under a running tap so that the thinnest stream of water runs over the fish for more or less 36 hours – 30 years of experience telling her exactly when they are ready, so with just enough salt to give depth of flavour. According to Lina this can gives you rather a woolly texture – she bites her teeth and points to a dish cloth as she as she says this, then laughs. Most stalls simply sit the salted fillets in a tub of water, which is changed several times. Times have changed and salt cod is no longer cheap, but traditions live on – especially in Rome where salt cod is called baccalà and stalls such as Enzo and Lina’s soak it in preparation for Friday. North Atlantic cod, salted heavily to preserve it, was widely imported into Catholic Europe as a cheap way of providing fish for the masses on Fridays and fast days, when meat was avoided. It is the soaking of salt cod Lina is telling me about. Then, on Fridays, there are bags of soaked chickpeas – properly plump things ready for the pan – and salt cod. They also sell dried goods, bottles of wine, vinegar and tomato sauce, and bread rolls shaped like rosettes, which Lina makes into sandwiches with a rare sort of care and attention. Primarily they sell cured meat, cured fish and cheese, their mozzarella di bufala being particularly fresh and fine – pure white balls and plaits of various sizes bobbing optimistically in opaque liquid. “That is the secret.” It is an ordinary stall that Lina runs so well with her husband, Enzo, near the former slaughterhouse at Testaccio market. ![]()
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