Home › December › Cod Fish Balls
Cod Fish Balls
1 cup "picked up" codfish. 2⅔ cups potatoes. 1 egg well beaten. 1 tablespoon butter.
Few grains pepper.
PROCESS: Wash fish and cover with cold water; let stand several hours, "pick up" in small pieces. Wash, pare and cut potatoes in small cubes, measure them, soak in cold water for an hour; cook with fish in boiling water until potatoes are soft. Drain through a sieve until quite dry; return to sauce-pan in which they were cooked, mash thoroughly that there may be no lumps left in potatoes. Add butter, egg and pepper. Beat with a slotted wooden spoon until very light. Season with salt if necessary. Take up by rounded tablespoons, place in croquette basket and fry one minute in deep hot Cottolene (frying six fish balls at a time); drain on brown paper. Allow fat to reheat between fryings.
A New England salt-cod recipe from a book written to sell a brand of shortening. The technique holds up; a few of the materials need translating.
- "Picked up" codfishThis is salt cod, sold dried and stiff in boxes or slabs, not fresh cod. "Picking up" means shredding the soaked fish into small flakes with your fingers. Boneless salt cod sold in vacuum packs works, but soak and taste it before committing — brands vary enormously in saltiness.
- The soak"Several hours" is the minimum. Heavily salted cod wants 12 to 24 hours in the refrigerator with two or three changes of cold water. Taste a shred raw before cooking; if it makes you wince, keep soaking.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening sold by N. K. Fairbank & Co., long discontinued. Any neutral frying oil or vegetable shortening does the same job.
- Deep-fat temperatureThe book gives none. Fry at 375F. Below that the balls soak up fat and slump; much above it and the outside colors before the center heats through. "Allow fat to reheat between fryings" is the period's way of saying keep the temperature steady, which is the single instruction that decides whether these come out light or greasy.
- 2 2/3 cups potatoesMeasured after peeling and dicing, as the recipe specifies — roughly 1 lb of raw potato. Use a floury variety such as russet; waxy potatoes will not mash smooth and give a gummy ball.
- Drying the potatoes"Drain through a sieve until quite dry" matters more than it sounds. Return the drained potato and fish to the hot dry pan over low heat for a minute to steam off moisture before mashing. Wet mixture spatters and falls apart in the fat.
- Croquette basket and brown paperA small wire basket lowered into the fat; a slotted spoon or spider does the same. Drain on a rack over a sheet pan rather than paper, which traps steam and softens the crust.
- Salt"Season with salt if necessary" is deliberate — after a long soak some fish needs it and some does not. Taste the mashed mixture before adding the egg.
- YieldThe book gives none. By rounded tablespoon the mixture should make roughly two dozen balls, fried six at a time as the recipe directs; enough for four as a course with eggs or a tomato sauce.
Salt cod balls were a fixture of the New England Sunday and Monday breakfast table, built from the two things a nineteenth-century household always had on hand: dried fish that kept indefinitely without ice, and potatoes. The salting and drying of Atlantic cod underwrote the region's economy for two centuries, and the codfish ball is what that trade looked like once it reached an ordinary kitchen, hot and light. 52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbooks published by manufacturers to promote a product, in this case Cottolene, the cottonseed shortening marketed by N. K. Fairbank & Co. as a cheaper substitute for lard; that is why the frying medium is named by brand rather than simply called fat. The croquette basket and the instruction to let the fat recover between batches reflect a period when deep frying was done in an open kettle on a coal or gas range, when fat thermometers were uncommon in home kitchens and the cook generally judged heat by eye.