brandade a French culinary term which occurs almost exclusively in the name of one salt cod dish: Brandade de morue, made by vigorously beating milk and olive oil into the previously poached fish to make a thick white purée. The dish is a speciality of the land-locked city of Nîmes in the Languedoc province of France and the first published recipe is to be found in a cookbook published by a chef from Nîmes, the Cuisinier Durand, in 1830. It had begun to be prominent in Paris at the beginning of the 19th century. According to grimod de la reynière (1805) a Parisian restaurateur made his fortune from serving Brandade de merluche (salted and dried hake). Although Grimod describes this dish as being laced with garlic, and many modern recipes still consider garlic to be characteristic of brandade, Durand’s recipe notes: ‘one may add a little garlic to this preparation, if one is not afraid of it, but it is not essential.’ Similarly, people who labour under the misapprehension that potato should be included can be referred to a late 19th-century author who explained that this was not used in the south of France, although further north, where olive oil was less popular, potato was used in order to prevent the flavour of the dish being too strong, and to make it more digestible. Recent authorities have speculated that changes such as these, which have been made outside the south of France in order to make the famous dish more accessible, are now being reflected, if only to a slight extent, in the procedures followed in the south of France itself. If so, this would be an interesting example of how an ‘internationalized’ version of a dish may eventually begin to compete with (and potentially oust) the authentic version in the region of origin.
