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Comment by mu_killnine | Hacker News Reader

I just watched a fascinating video on 18th century cooking where this same kind of fish (cod) is prepared: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdzAt6e1l-c

I thought the step where they beat the fish with a mallet was so wild. It's certainly led me down a rabbit hole of seeing how we used to prepare food a few hundred years ago.

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Stockfish has been the main ingredient of a very traditional plate in north east Italy for more than four hundred years [1]. These days it is not used as much as in the past, but you can still find stockfish in a number of supermarkets. Preparing the fish for cooking takes 2-3 days, and the first step is of course beating it with a mallet :-)

[1] It was in fact considered food for poor people which is quite strange since it was imported from far places.

> It was in fact considered food for poor people which is quite strange since it was imported from far places.

Well, so was lobster at one point...

As a matter of fact the two stories are related, because code is one of lobster's main natural predators and overfishing of the former led to an overpopulation of the latter.

Necessity being the mother of invention, that's a common theme to the more traditional cuisines.

> I thought the step where they beat the fish with a mallet was so wild.

Is it really so wild? Beating on it remains a common way of tenderising meat.

wonder if this was for softening up or killing macro parasites and eggs

It's for softening. The process breaks up the meat fibers both for easier chewing and for absorbing your saliva into the fibers. The latter makes it tastier when you chew it longer.

You can find similar dried fish / squids in Korean and Vietnamese grocery stores. Roast them slightly and they go really well with beers.

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