Despite the name, it is not salt cod but stockfish: air-dried cod, softened in water for days, then cooked very slowly for hours with milk, oil, salted anchovies, garlic, parsley and pepper, until it becomes a cream eaten with polenta, white or yellow. The prized variety is the «Ragno» from Norway's Lofoten Islands.
Stockfish has been preserved this way since the time of Charlemagne, in the ninth century, in the seas of the North. But Veneto's tradition is said to trace to the shipwreck of the navigator Pietro Querini, who in 1432 ran his ship aground on the Norwegian island of Røst: back home, he brought stockfish with him, and from there the habit of cooking it was born.
In 1987 the Confraternita del Bacalà was founded in Sandrigo, near Vicenza, by restaurateurs and gastronomes including the writer Virgilio Scapin: Sandrigo now calls itself the «home of baccalà» and hosts a two-week festival dedicated to the dish every year.
