The Rituality of Fish in Southern Cuisine, Between Religion And Creativity.
🏠 A Scent Of Home And Respect.
Every Friday in my grandmother’s house, the smell of codfish invaded the rooms before the sun even rose. It was a ritual. The salted fish was left to desalt for hours, immersed in the carefully changed water, as if it were an ancient ceremony. No one dared to touch it until the time was right. Because it was not just food: it was respect, it was tradition. It was the voice of religion enforcing fasting, brilliantly transformed into a riot of flavor.
Today that gesture has become a memory, but the codfish continues to tell the story of who we are through recipes that taste of history and folk ingenuity.
📜 A Salty Story Of Faith And Commerce.
Those vines became Catalanesca, a grape that would feed the tables of Vesuvius over the centuries. For generations it was consumed as a table grape: crisp flesh, sweet but never cloying, resistant to storage. The farmers of Monte Somma made it a valuable resource and a local pride.
The presence of cod in Southern Italian cuisine is the result of a long history of trade, faith and necessity. Imported since the Middle Ages from northern European countries, salt-preserved cod became a key ingredient in regions where meat was expensive or unaffordable.
Lean Fridays and Lent imposed abstinence from meat, and cod, thanks to its long shelf life and affordable price, entered the pantries of the people on a stable basis. In the Kingdom of Naples, its spread was fostered by the Bourbons, becoming the protagonist of an inventive popular cuisine, where each region gave it a different voice.
🍽️ The Poor Man's Fish, The Feast Of Tastings
Fried in batter, stewed with black olives, with tomatoes, with potatoes or with cruschi peppers: salt cod has become a symbol of a cuisine that never gives up. A cuisine capable of turning a “fast” into a true ritual of taste. Cod was the fish of the poor, but also proof of savoir-faire. Each family guarded its own method of desalting and its own variant of preparation, handed down with precise gestures and whispered words between women of different generations.
👨🍳 From Tradition To Creation: My Codfish
I remember the first event where I decided to offer a menu entirely dedicated to cod. Some people wrinkled their noses. “It’s eve stuff,” they said. But one taste of my cod crudo with sweet potatoes, ginger and lemon was enough to change their minds.
For me, cod is a bridge between memory and innovation. It is an ingredient that allows itself to be shaped, but demands respect. To know it is to know how to listen to the stories it carries. And that’s what I try to do, every time I put it in a dish.
did you know that?
👉 Cod is not a fish, but the trade name for salt cod.
👉 There are dozens of regional variations in Campania and Calabria, some handed down only orally.
👉 It was the protagonist of a “taste war” in the postwar period, when attempts were made to replace it with industrial products.
👉 In some families in the South, they would even desalt cod in the bathtub for large collective preparations.
The Recipes
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