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Codfish Balls
2 cupfuls mashed potatoes, 1 1/2 cupfuls shredded codfish, 1 egg, 1 tablespoonful Crisco, melted, 1/8 teaspoonful pepper. Put codfish in wire strainer, let cold water run through and squeeze dry. Mix the hot unseasoned potatoes with codfish. To this add the melted Crisco, beaten egg and pepper. Beat well. Shape in balls and fry in deep Crisco until a golden brown color.
A Crisco company recipe from the era when shredded salt cod came in a wooden box and needed no soaking, only rinsing. Two things decide the outcome: the dryness of the fish and the temperature of the fat.
- Shredded codfishThis means dry salt cod sold pre-shredded, which was rinsed rather than soaked overnight. If you are working from a whole salt cod fillet, soak it for 24 hours with several changes of water, then flake and squeeze; the strainer rinse alone will leave a bone-dry fillet far too salty.
- Squeeze it genuinely dryWet fish gives a slack mixture that falls apart in the fat. Press it hard in the strainer, then blot in a towel. Note that no salt appears in the ingredient list; the fish presumably supplies it.
- Hot unseasoned potatoesHot matters: warm potato binds with the egg and fish into a cohesive paste, while cold mashed potato stays granular and the balls crack. Use plain boiled and mashed potato with no milk, butter or cream, which would loosen the mixture further.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911 and the sponsor of this book. Any neutral frying oil works in both places — one tablespoon melted in the mixture, and enough for deep frying.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no test or temperature. Period cookbooks commonly judged deep fat by a bread cube browning in about a minute, usually taken as somewhere in the region of 365-375F. Too cool and the balls soak fat and disintegrate; too hot and they colour too fast.
- Shaping and handlingForm balls about the size of a walnut. Chilling the shaped balls for 20 minutes firms them and reduces spattering. Lower them in with a slotted spoon a few at a time so the fat does not drop in temperature.
- TimingTwo to three minutes is enough — everything in the mixture is already cooked, and you are only browning the crust and setting the egg.
- YieldDepends entirely on the size of the balls; the recipe gives none. Such dishes were commonly served for breakfast or a light supper, sometimes with a tomato sauce or a wedge of lemon.
Salt cod balls belong to New England more firmly than to any other American region, a direct inheritance of the Atlantic cod trade that made Massachusetts fortunes; the fish kept for months without ice and was still a staple of the ordinary household pantry when this book was written. By the early twentieth century the labour had largely been taken out of it: flaked salt cod came ready-flaked in a small wooden box, needing only a rinse rather than the overnight soaking a whole dried fillet demands, which is why this recipe can move so briskly from strainer to frying pot. The insistent Crisco — melted into the mixture and again in the kettle — marks the book as one of the promotional cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned after launching the shortening in 1911, arguing its case against lard in recipe after recipe.