COD BRANDADE

Cod brandade à la cétoise. Here we discover another emblematic speciality of the house. Cod brandade à la cétoise.

And you’ll see, its history is full of twists and turns. Contrary to popular belief, brandade de morue did not originate in Nîmes. It’s a recipe that can be found wherever cod was salted and traded.

In Spain, Malta, Italy, Portugal and Sète. The people of Nîmes were very skilful communicators in a century when, it has to be said, news did not spread as widely as it does today, and at least not with the same degree of contradiction.

They succeeded in making the whole world believe that cod brandade was born in their country. At Azaïs-Polito, we wanted to re-establish the historical truth, as recorded in the registers of the merchant navy in the mid-19th century.

And above all, to pay tribute to the former merchants of Sète, who played a major role in the cod trade in the Mediterranean. In the 19th century, Sète was home to the largest cod dryers in the south of France, located on the Mascoulé site, very close to the quays and practically in the town itself, as you can see from the never-before-seen photos in the Polito family collection.

The merchant navy archives mention that nearly 5 million cod were landed here on our quays. Three Cetois families, the Komolés, the Nègres-Cousins and the Bailés, alone owned a quarter of the cod fishing fleet in the port of Fécamp in Normandy, which was France’s leading cod fishing port at the time.

These ships belonged to the people of Sète but were manned by crews from Fécamp. They sailed to Newfoundland to catch cod before returning south to Sète, where the whiter, purer Mediterranean salt was used to enhance the colour of the dried fish. At the time, it was one of the most expensive and sought-after salts.

In fact, it was this salt from the Villeroy salt pans in Sète, on the Corniche beach, that made the reputation of the port of Sète and gave rise to a whole area of expertise around saurisserie salting, an old-fashioned semi-preserving technique still practised today by Azaïs-Polito. When Azaïs-Polito decided to revive the brandade from Cététoise, it wasn’t just to make another product, it was to revive a memory, that of the Cététois traders and shipowners who provided the link between the Mediterranean and the Far North. This history resurfaced in 2016, during a conference on the salt route, when a local historian, Mr Servin, confirmed the central role played by Sète in the Mediterranean cod trade.

At Azaïs-Polito, cod brandade is not a marketing product. It’s a tribute to our past as sailors and traders. But what really sets Azaïs-Polito brandade apart is the way in which it is still made – you guessed it, the old-fashioned way. Here, we work with whole cod fillets, without cheating. First, we desalinate the cod in milk, then we prepare it in milk and oil, exactly as the traditional Cétoise recipe dictates. In other words, just as our grandmothers used to do after buying salted cod at the first Halles de Sète in 1885, when an entire market was dedicated to cod, the main staple, because at the time the only fish that could be kept for a long time was cod.

Don’t miss the map of the old Halles in the exhibition, or the photo showing a policeman guarding this precious foodstuff on the star boxes. As you can see, on our production boards at Azaïs-Polito, it’s just like it used to be.

In our cod brandade, there are no thickeners, no added water, no emulsifiers, and even less nitrogen gas. The result is a very fibrous, silky, creamy texture and a delicate flavour. The taste of cod, not chemicals.

Unlike industrial brandades, which have little to do with the original recipe, manufacturers generally use what they call the fish parts. In other words, the waste, skin, bones and nervous bits. Everything is blended, inflated with water, then bound with thickening and emulsifying powders, when not adding liquid nitrogen to better aerate what we at Azaïs-Polito call an industrial cod mousse that could be compared to the chocolate mousses of the big agri-food groups.

It’s a process, or even an industrial by-product, that makes it possible to obtain 10 times more skin from the same quantity of fish used in the recipe. It’s a process that takes consumers away from the real texture and taste of the traditional recipe. As an indicator, read the labels and choose a cod brandade whose ingredients list cod first, i.e. as the main ingredient, and not, as some do, when oil or even worse, water are listed first.