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Boiled Cod
Wash the fish (about 2 to 3 pounds cod), and put into a fish-kettle, containing enough boiling water to cover it. Add some salt, bring quickly to boil; then draw pan to side of fire, and let it stay in hot water until cooked. Do not let water boil or simmer again. Cod cooked in this way has a much finer flavor than if it is allowed to simmer or boil. Take up fish on drainer, slide it on to a hot dish on a folded napkin, and serve garnished with sprigs of crisp parsley. Send to table with oyster sauce, which is made as follows: 4 tablespoons Crisco, 6 tablespoons flour, 1 small onion, 1/2 carrot, 12 whole peppers, 1/2 bay leaf, 1 clove, 1 bouquet garni, small blade mace, salt, and ten oysters. Peel the onion, scrape carrot; put them into saucepan with bay leaf, whole pepper, bouquet garni, and clove; add milk, and bring to boil. When milk boils take out mace and bay leaf. Melt Crisco in small saucepan; mix in flour smoothly; whisk into this hot milk. Stir until it boils, then let it simmer from 10 to 15 minutes. Take out bouquet; rub sauce through a sieve. Take 10 oysters and their liquor and put into a saucepan and bring to boiling point. Then take the oysters and cut each in quarters. Heat the sauce and add the oyster liquor, reduce well, strain and return to saucepan; stir in 1 yolk of egg, bind, and then add oysters and lemon juice. Stir till hot, but it must not boil. Season to taste and serve.
A Victorian-British method that survived into American cookbooks: the cod is never actually boiled, only held in water just off the boil. The recipe as printed omits the quantity of milk for the sauce.
- The hinge: never let it boilBring the water up, then pull the pan off the heat and hold it there. Fish protein begins to set somewhere around 130F, and the flakes separate and turn cottony if the water bubbles. The recipe gives no time; as a rough modern guide a 2-3 lb fish will take something like 20-25 minutes in water held well below a simmer, and is cooked through by about 145F at the thickest point.
- Missing milkThe ingredient list names no liquid, but the method says "add milk" and then thickens it with 4 tablespoons fat and 6 tablespoons flour. That roux suits about 1 pint (2 cups) of milk, and even then the sauce will be thick by modern taste " thin it toward 2 1/2 cups if you want a pouring consistency.
- CriscoThis book was written to sell it. Substitute butter, weight for weight, for a better-tasting sauce; 4 tablespoons of butter to 6 of flour makes a slightly dry roux, so work it patiently before the milk goes in.
- Fish-kettleA long lidded pan with a perforated lifting tray. A roasting pan with a rack, or a large deep skillet with the fish on a sling of doubled cheesecloth, does the same job " the point is lifting the fish out intact.
- Whole peppers and blade maceWhole peppers are black peppercorns; a blade of mace is a strip of the lacy aril from nutmeg, sold whole in spice shops. A quarter teaspoon of ground mace is a fair substitute, added with the milk. Note that the recipe tells you to remove the mace and bay leaf, then later says to sieve the sauce anyway.
- The oystersBring them to the boiling point in their own liquor only long enough for the edges to ruffle " 30 seconds to a minute. They go back into the sauce at the very end and want only to heat through. Ten oysters is generous for a pint of sauce.
- The egg liaisonTemper the yolk with a ladle of hot sauce before it goes in, and keep the pan below about 180F afterward. Once it boils the yolk curdles and the sieving was wasted.
- Serving and yieldThe folded napkin under the fish absorbs draining water " a linen tea towel does it. Two to three pounds of cod feeds four as a main course.
Boiled cod with oyster sauce was a fixture of the British dinner table through the nineteenth century, cod and oysters both being cheap and abundant on the Atlantic coasts, and it crossed to American cookbooks largely unchanged. The insistence that the fish be cooked in water "drawn to the side of the fire" reflects a coal range, where a pot could be slid off the hottest plate and left to coast " a technique that reads as gentle poaching to us and was simply good housekeeping then. This particular version comes from one of the recipe collections published in the years after Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco in 1911, when the company is generally said to have promoted menus and cookbooks to persuade cooks that hydrogenated vegetable shortening could replace butter and lard in every application, sauces included.