Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [50]
LUTEFISK OR LYE FISH A most particular speciality of Scandinavia, this has not made many converts in the outside world. You begin with stockfish which is soaked for a week, then submerged in a lye of birchwood ashes and slaked lime. After this, the fish is soaked for a further week, with daily changes of water. For cooking, the lutefisk is tied into a cheesecloth bag and poached in boiling water. Salt is added after the water boils so that the cooked fish will ‘shiver’, this being the test of first class lutefisk. The jellied texture and special flavour are not to everyone’s taste. Even Alan Davidson, whose inclination is towards every kind of fish in whatever form human ingenuity can devise, was cautious on the subject in his North Atlantic Seafood.
Despite the Christmas importance of lutefisk in Norway, Sweden and Finland, and in their settlements overseas, Mr Davidson was not convinced. He concluded that it survives as a fossil, its origin having been in past exigencies of climate and rough transport. A pamphlet I have from one of the producing firms, in Norway, instructs the cook to poach or steam the lutefisk, then provide ‘bacon fat, mustard sauce, grated brown cheese’ – this I take to mean gjetöst – ‘syrup, pease pottage or white sauce, to choice, accompanied by boiled potatoes and thin wafer crispbread’. The melted bacon fat, hot with little bits of bacon in it, seems intended, Mr Davidson says, to obscure an unpleasing taste that need not have been there in the first place.
AIOLI GARNI WITH SALT COD
The most spectacular dish of summer holidays in Provence is aioli, or ailloli garni, or le grand aioli. At its most flamboyant, it is a Matisse-coloured salad of salt cod and other fish; vegetables fresh and dried, raw and cooked; hard-boiled eggs, snails, and lemon quarters. With it comes a huge bowl of a special garlic mayonnaise. The flavour has nothing to do with rubbing a clove of garlic discreetly round a salad bowl. It comes from clove after clove after clove. So important is this sauce that the dish carries its name of aioli – ail being French for garlic – with all the rest reduced to the status of a garnish, lordly abundance being just an excuse as it were for eating the sauce. Although the classic mayonnaise has a way of dominating nomenclature – mayonnaise de saumon, mayonnaise de homard – I think no other name touches the grandeur of aioli garni which often appears as le grand aioli.
The start of a dish of this kind is a visit to the market, to see what vegetables are at their best. The salt cod you will have in stock: it should already be soaking, and have been soaking for about thirty-six hours.
Bear in mind the balance of your dish, what you can assemble by way of eggs, snails, semi-dried or dried beans. The obvious lack so far is crispness – celery, radishes, chicory, cardoon, Florentine fennel, sweet peppers; you serve them raw. Then there are vegetables that need only light cooking – sugar peas, string beans, cauliflower, sprouting broccoli of various kinds.
Deal with all your items, poaching the salt cod, cooking the dried beans and so on, cutting the raw vegetables, and arrange everything on a huge dish, interspersed with lemon quarters, the egg, snails, etc.
Now make the aioli* itself, and put it into a large bowl or bowls depending on the number of people involved. Serve with cloth napkins, as large as possible. Like anchoiade (p. 54) this kind of communal buffet dish can be excessively uncomfortable unless attention is paid to detail.
BACALAO AL PIL-PIL
Salt cod can be cooked in olive oil made piquant and spicy with dried chillis and garlic, in the same way as elvers or prawns (pp. 127 and 284). The thing about this