My cousin Margarita had a big smile on her face the first year she made salted cod for the holidays. Her father liked it a lot. He knew a thing or two about bacalao, as it's called in Mexico, it was one of his mother's signature holiday dishes. The other is an herb-seasoned, mole-drenched, shrimp cake dish called romeritos. She's made both for the holidays more than 50 years and she's gotten good at it.
Last year Margarita's father, Elias, began buying some of the ingredients a couple of months before the holidays: olive oil, the stiff cod, the capers, etc. He was ill.
I visited both in Mexico City a couple of months before he died. We took a wonderful day trip to Xochitla, a former country club north of Mexico City turned into a park. The place has walking paths, a train for the kids, and yellow-winged butterflies that fluttered in chaotic swarms from tree to tree. Elias walked slowly.
I returned to Mexico in December, 2007 for his funeral. After the funeral she asked her mother what to do with all the ingredients her father had bought. "Make the dish for your father." she said. So Margarita soaked the cod for a week, changing the water each day to get rid of the salt. They'd bought potatoes no wider than a quarter, boiled them and carefully peeled them with a paring knife. They sat down and ate the bacalao and it tasted better than the year before.
Margarita told me all of this a couple of weeks ago. This year, she said, she and her husband began buying the ingredients a few months before the holidays. They soaked the cod, simmered it in tomato, onion and garlic and brought it north to my father's house in Torreon where we'd all agreed to meet right after Christmas. She spooned bite-sized portions of the bacalao onto Ritz crackers. It was an appetizer, but that night it could have been an entire meal. Not just because it filled me, but because it was her father's bacalao.
It was very good. Better than last year's but not as good as next year's.
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