Ballard to Brazil and Back: Salt cod returns to Northwest cuisine
Bruno (Michael Bruno is his street name) specializes in food from "anyplace touched by the culture of Spain." He slices an inch-thick block, lays it on a plate, and garnishes it with drizzles of parsley oil and dollops of homemade mayonnaise, pickled red onions and egg. I tease some of the salad onto a fork and take a taste. Yes, there's the potato and the peppery paprika. What's the flaky, slightly salty ingredient?
Salt cod.
"It's peasant food," says Bruno. "It's an everyday food."
Wait a minute. Salt cod? Wasn't that something the Norwegian great-grandmothers of my Ballard friends used to feed their sons and daughters? It disappeared from North American store shelves 50 years ago. Yet here it is; only this time, salt cod is part of what Bruno calls "Nuevo Latino" cuisine. It's yet another example of a traditional food transformed into a gourmet's delight.
Ballardite Olav Lunde remembers salt cod. He was born in Norway in 1918. He would catch codfish, fillet it and pack it in salt. You could also buy salt cod in barrels, which could last months. Salt cod isn't the same as lutefisk, which is a cod paste preserved with lye. Lunde's mother, Trina, was known to serve salt cod seven days a week on occasion, especially in the winter. "Sometimes you had white sauce," he says. "And other times she served it with butter and onions." He used to cook salt cod for his children, he says, "but my grandchildren aren't all that crazy about fish."
Lunde emigrated to the United States after World War II, just as the Puget Sound codfishing industry was ending. From the late 1890s to 1950, a fleet of sailing ships trekked 2,000 miles every spring to the Bering Sea to catch cod. The three- and four-masted schooners started their journey from Fishermen's Terminal near Ballard and from Poulsbo, returning five months later with 500 tons each of filleted cod packed in rock salt. One of those ships, the Wawona, still floats at South Lake Union next to the Center for Wooden Boats.
Dave Wright of Anacortes fished for cod from the Wawona for three seasons in the 1940s. Now 84, he remembers taking a dory out and landing thousands of 20-pound cod with hand lines. He enjoyed the fishing, but the ship reeked of codfish offal.
"I used to open a bottle of shaving lotion over my bunk and it would cover up the stink so I could sleep," he says.
The North American market for salt cod dried up when housewives started storing fresh fish in new mass-produced freezers and refrigerators. But European cod fishermen found a new market in South America. Actually, salt cod was as much a staple in Spanish and Portuguese households as in northern Europe; the southerners just never lost their taste for it. Of course, they gave it a different name: bacalao in Spanish, bacalhau in Portuguese. Graças Ribeiro, co-owner of Tempero de Brazil restaurant and a native of Brazil, says bacalhau remains popular in Brazil due to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics avoid meat on certain holy days, such as Good Friday. Eating bacalhau is a way of following church tradition.
"We love seafood," she adds. "The bacalhau is the king of fish."
Ribeiro uses some of the same salt-cod-preparation techniques at her 4-year-old University District restaurant as the Norwegian immigrants once used in Ballard. She gets boneless salt-cod fillets from a local seafood wholesaler. The wholesaler gets the cod from Nova Scotia, Canada, in small wooden boxes. (Scandinavian Specialties in Ballard sells salt cod retail.) Ribeiro rinses off the excess salt and soaks the fillet in water for two or three days, changing the water frequently. The soaking removes almost all the excess salt. At the same time, the fillet doubles in weight.
A bacalhau dish often shares two other ingredients with Norwegian preparations: onions and potatoes. "Some people say that if something is too salty, put in potato, which will tone down the saltiness," Ribeiro says.
The two traditions diverge from here. Ribeiro's own practices come from Brazil's northern coastal state of Bahia. For a dish called Bacalhau do Tempero, Ribeiro adds garlic, olive oil, tomato paste, cilantro and coconut milk. She mixes these in a frying pan over medium heat with bacalhau chunks, slabs of yellow onion and slices of boiled potato. The sauce comes out a light red with flecks of green. She pours the mixture over boiled rice and serves it with imported beer. The cilantro flavor flags the dish as anything but Scandinavian.
Tango's Bruno has traced the resurgence of salt cod/bacalhau in the United States to Miami, perhaps to Cuban immigrants. They brought cooking traditions from Spain and South America. By using fresh Northwest ingredients and soaking the cod in milk rather than water, he puts a personal touch on the tradition.
"I bring in my own style," he says.
Joe Follansbee is a Seattle-based free-lance writer. He is writing a book on the Puget Sound codfishing industry.