Photographiesjeanturco, numéro : 1601 (2022) Photography by Jean Turco

I had this afternoon, around 6 p.m., the deadline at which it is appropriate to ask oneself if there is nothing missing in the refrigerator for the evening meal, want to make a Polenta as we have always made it at me. Namely with simply three liters of water, thirty-six grams of salt and seven hundred and fifty grams of "bramata a grana grossa" flour which is placed in a "paiolo di ghisa" and which is made cook while turning it, in a reasonable way, for a good fifty minutes. The time that a burnt crust forms on the walls of the paiolo which will accompany, later, sympathetically and deliciously, a bowl of whole and fresh milk. With polenta, which was the bread of my grandparents and ancestors, I kinda like everything that it accompanies perfectly, but this evening, having reread an excellent book by Paolo Cossi in praise of Pietro Querini, grandfather from my friend Count Paolo Francis Quirini, I wanted to accompany him with baccalà; Indeed Pietro, whose boat had been shipwrecked on the Norwegian coast, discovered there on this occasion the "stick fish" that on his return to Italy he was going to import, around the 1930s of the fourteenth century. This "stick" fish, the "stoccafisso", is cod dried on the yards of the ships used at the time and preserved in the air. In the absence of a sailboat and yards to dry the cod there, it is now dried on less photogenic but certainly more convenient stretches. A trip to Iris, my favorite fishmonger where I usually find it perfectly cooked, should have allowed me to meet the gaze of a fish that Iris assured me was perfect in an "umido" that would go perfectly with my polenta. My idea, seeing him, was to take this photo and so he replaced the baccalà. And, after having photographed and cooked it according to the rules of an art which sometimes and this evening in particular escape me, I must say that I would have done better to stick to my first idea, because, if it is certainly photogenic, this fish whose name I have forgotten, is not worth the baccalà or even the simple trout in umido whose preparation, advice to amateurs, I perfectly master. NB: To balance the image, I shortened the fish and its missing part on the photograph, cooked in "Umido" turned out to be a story that some will assure "without tail or head" And they don't have everything quite wrong.