The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [51]
It is often said that this is why the people of Bilbao eat so much salt cod, which is probably not true. The Basques, including Bilbaínos, had been eating salt cod since they developed the product many centuries earlier. But a typical salt cod dish of the day was a stew with many ingredients. During the siege, no fresh food could get in to the city, which in time left its inhabitants with little more than three nonperishable staples: olive oil, garlic, and dried pepper.
The First Carlist War, drawn by M. Miranda, Panarama Español, Madrid, 1842.
Salt cod cooked in olive oil with slices of dried guindilla pepper and garlic became a popular dish called pil pil, though the origin of this name is not clear. The tendency is to assume that this odd-looking term means something in Euskera. Disappointingly, it has no more meaning in that ancient language than it does in Spanish or English. As with the origins of the Basques themselves, explanations abound, ranging from a reference to pelota to the sound of sizzling olive oil. As with many Basque words, the orthography became almost a question of personal preference. Pil-pil with a hyphen was often used, and a 1912 book called it pirpir, one in 1919 said pin pin, and one in 1930 wrote of pirpil. The 1892 General Dictionary of Cuisine published in Madrid defined “pil pill” as “the name of a new red sauce the Bilbaíno gastronomes have invented now to eat with their famous chipirones, or squid:” The only explanation for this definition is that it was neither the first nor the last time a Madrid publication got its Basque facts wrong.
All of these variations on the name lend credence to the theory that the word is an onomatopoeia attempting to capture the sound of sizzling olive oil. An 1896 book, Lexicón Bilbaíno by Emiliano Arriaga, stated that the dish while cooking made the sound “bil-bil” but that, since there is a tendency to transpose ps and bs, which he also stated is the origin of the name Bilbao, the sauce became known as “pil-pil.” The only problem then is that pil pil doesn’t go “pil pil” anymore.
At some point later in the century, it was discovered that if the cooked salt cod was placed in an earthen casserole with warm but not at all sizzling oil and garlic, and the casserole was moved in a circular motion over a very low heat, the oil would thicken into a creamy, opaque, ivory-colored sauce.
The people of Bilbao like to say that the chefs of San Sebastián are French influenced, and though this may sound appealing to the outside world, especially the French, it is not intended to be a compliment. But the unpleasant truth is that in the late nineteenth century, Bilbao chefs were developing a number of sauces for their salt cod, because sauces were the fashion in French cuisine.
Nevertheless, this particular sauce was brilliant. Called ligado, meaning “bound” or “thickened” in Spanish, it had more craft and more originality—and more mystery—than the older, sizzling, clear-oil pil pil. Today almost no one makes the original pil pil, whereas ligado is considered the litmus test of a Basque chef. But apparently everyone still liked to say “pil pil,” and it has become the name for the thickened, ligado sauce.
There is a sense of alchemy to the emulsification of a good pil pil. It happens slowly as the casserole is being moved, the low temperature perfectly maintained, a little—not too much—of the water the fish was cooked in added to make more liquid. This is not a mayonnaise; there is no solid suspended in the oil. It is a sauce made purely of liquids, some of which somehow become solidified and suspended in the remaining liquid. There is not even a change in temperature. In fact, most cooks agree that all parts of the pil pil should be maintained at the same constant tepid state.
That is one of the few things agreed on. As with all Basque salt cod dishes, almost no one agrees