Baccalà alla Livornese (Leghourn-style cod)

Nowadays you can eat fish everywhere. Probably you do not know that, but the best place to have some fresh fish in Italy is Milan, even if it is far away from the sea. The reason is that it hosts one of the biggest fish markets in Europe, and here is where all the fish is collected and handled before it reaches your table.
But it was not like this in the past. As it was impossible to keep fresh the fish during transportation from the coast to the internal areas, someone living in Florence had to rely on fresh water fish or processed (salted or dried) fish. Going back to the Renaissance period, many villas of that time had huge tanks to store fish. Villa la Petraia and Villa di Castello in Florence are an example of this as you can see from the picture that I enclose here and that reproduces Villa di Castello as it was in the past.
Salted anchovies were a good example of the kind of fish that was consumed in Florence in the past. You can find them as ingredient in many dishes, crostini and salsa verde for example. I have already given a recipe for these in this blog. However a cheap source of protein in the past were for sure the products coming from North Atlantic, in particular Herrings and Cod. Funny enough, nowadays they are a very expensive alternative to the fresh and cheap Sea Basses that come from the fish farms.
So coming to cod there are two kinds, the Baccala’ (salted) and Stoccafisso (dry). In both case their name comes from German and means fish in a stick. The meaning that I have given to the two words is how we use it in Florence, but I might be wrong. In Florence we typically have Baccala’, the salted version. Local food shops (good old times when there was one in every corner… now they have disappeared!) used to sell it on Fridays, when the Catholic tradition prohibits the consumption of meat. I have never understood why if you are not supposed to eat meat you can have fish instead, but this is my personal consideration.  The shops used to start preparing it on Thursday. The preparation involves wetting (re-hydrating) and removing the excess salt. For this reason they put the baccala’ in a special tank with continous flow of water. If you buy the salted version, just put it in water and change the water every 30 min. That should do the job. It might take one day before the fish is ready.
Remove the bones, the skin , and cut the fish in stripes. Cover with plenty of flour and fry the cod in oil (peanuts oil would do the job). In a separate pan fry some garlic, capers and chilli peppers in some olive oil. Once the garlic turns golden, add the tomato sauce and leave it cooking for a few minutes. Before serving briefly cook the cod in the sauce and serve hot with plenty of chopped parsley on top of the fish. It is delicious. In this way you can prepare also red mullets, which are a typical fish of Leghourn. In this case clean the fish (remove the inside and grate off the sloughs), cover in flour, fry and then put in the sauce. They are delicious!!!!