Why bacalhau will always taste like home

By Isabel Vincent

I grew up in a Portuguese immigrant household in Toronto in the 1970s, where we ate bacalhau several times a week. You might not be excited by the idea of eating salted cod every other day, but for my family it was a reminder of where we came from. Occasionally we’d eat bacalhau at Portuguese restaurants, where they would prepare it in a casserole with shredded carrots and cream, but it always seemed wrong to me. Bacalhau was something to devour at home: the slabs of fish doused with olive oil from the faux-crystal decanter my parents would top up from a large yellow can.

Bacalhau in Portuguese (or bacalao in Spanish) has long been a staple in the Mediterranean. Brought to the region by Basque fishermen and traders in the late 1400s, today, thanks to stricter limits on fishing, it has become a high-priced delicacy in Iberian cuisine. The fish, which is split open, dried and salted after it has been caught, is tied to the peninsula’s identity. Miguel de Cervantes wrote about it in “Don Quixote” and in 1884, while living in Paris, the great Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz wrote a letter to a friend in which he described how he yearned for bacalhau smothered in caramelised onions.