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Boiled Fresh Cod
Wash and wipe a four-pound cut of fresh cod. Tie it loosely in a piece of cheese cloth just large enough to cover fish. Place on a trivet in a kettle, cover with boiling water, and add three slices onion, three slices carrot, one spray parsley, a bit of bay leaf, three cloves, a tablespoon salt and one-half cup vinegar. Bring quickly to the boiling point, then reduce heat and simmer gently from twenty to thirty minutes. Hard boiling breaks up the flakes of fish and toughens the fibre. Drain from liquor, place fish on serving platter, remove the skin and pour a few spoonfuls of Egg Sauce over the fish and the remainder around it. Sprinkle finely chopped parsley over all, and garnish with hard-cooked eggs cut to resemble pond lilies. 4 tablespoons butter. 3 tablespoons flour. 1 cup boiling water. 1/2 cup hot cream.
A plain court-bouillon poach, and the original is right about the one thing that matters: the water must never do more than shiver. Everything else needs a little translation.
- The hinge: no boilBring it to the boil, then drop the heat until the surface only trembles, around 160-175F. A rolling boil shreds the flakes apart and squeezes the fibres tough, exactly as the text warns.
- TimingTwenty to thirty minutes is generous for four pounds of cod. Reckon on roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point and start checking early; the flesh is opaque and separates at the bone with light pressure at around 140F, though 145F internal is the usual safe-cooking recommendation.
- The cutA "four-pound cut" most likely means a bone-in centre or tail section from a large whole fish; the skin is certainly on, since the recipe has you peel it off after cooking. Modern loin fillets of the same weight will cook a good deal faster and are more fragile.
- Cheesecloth and trivetThe cloth and the rack are not decorative. They are what let you lift four pounds of just-cooked fish out in one piece. A steamer insert, a folded strip of foil under the fish, or a fish kettle rack all do the same job; leave the cloth ends long enough to grip.
- The vinegarHalf a cup in the poaching liquid firms the surface protein and helps keep the flesh white. It is a court bouillon, not a marinade, and little of the vinegar flavour carries through into the finished fish.
- That trailing ingredient listThe butter, flour, boiling water and hot cream at the end are the base of the Egg Sauce; no method is given here, only the quantities. Make a roux with the butter and flour, whisk in the water and then the cream, season, and stir in chopped hard-cooked egg. You will need eggs anyway for the garnish.
- Pond liliesThe garnish is a hard-cooked egg cut in a zigzag around its equator so the two halves pull apart into toothed cups. Purely period decoration; halved or quartered eggs lose nothing but the flourish.
- YieldFour pounds bone-in serves six to eight as a main course, which is in keeping with a Sunday dinner table.
Boiled cod with egg sauce was a fixture of English and American Sunday and holiday tables well before this book appeared, and it survived into the twentieth century partly because cod was cheap, abundant and shipped well on ice from the North Atlantic banks. The technique here is a domesticated court bouillon: vinegar, aromatics and salt in the water, borrowed from professional kitchens and reduced to what a household cook could keep on the shelf. It belongs to a genre of menu-planning books that took the guesswork out of the week's most formal meal. The elaborate finish, chopped parsley and eggs cut into water lilies, is a small reminder that the Sunday dinner was expected to look like an occasion, not merely feed people.