The dried cod with seven faces
Salted, dried, storable for months – cod was, across centuries and borders, the most practical fish of the coasts. The Italian regions developed hundreds of recipes from this single basic ingredient: braised in tomato in Abruzzo, whipped creamy as “mantecato” in Veneto, cooked spicy in Calabria.
Conventional wisdom has it that Italian cuisine is always fresh. Baccalà teaches the opposite: preservation shaped the menu of the peninsula, and out of necessity grew a delicacy of its own.