Boiled Codfish
Soak over night, put in a pan of cold water, and simmer two or three hours. Serve with drawn butter, with hard-boiled eggs sliced on it. Codfish is also excellent broiled. After soaking sufficiently, grease the bars of the gridiron, broil, and serve with bits of butter dropped over it. This is a nice relish for tea. - Mrs. Lewis Brown.
This is salt cod, not fresh fish — the overnight soak gives it away, and it is the only reason the original can talk about hours of simmering. The method still works, but the timings belong to a saltier, harder, drier product than most shops sell now.
- The hinge: never let it boilSalt cod goes stringy and tough the moment the water bubbles. Bring it to a bare shiver — the surface barely moving — and hold it there. Nineteenth-century "simmer" was a looser term than ours, and what is wanted here is closer to a modern poach.
- Two or three hours is far too longThat timing assumes a plank of heavily cured, bone-dry nineteenth-century cod. Modern salt cod, and certainly the wetter salted fillets sold in vacuum packs, are done in 15 to 25 minutes, when the flesh separates into flakes under a fork.
- Soaking, done properlyOvernight is the minimum for a stiff, board-dry side. Change the water three or four times, refrigerate while it soaks, and taste a raw sliver before cooking — it should be pleasantly seasoned, not aggressively salty. Very dry fish may need 24 to 36 hours.
- Drawn butterIn this period it does not mean clarified butter. It is a plain white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon flour, a cup of hot water or the fish liquor, cooked out and seasoned. Cookbooks of this kind normally give a drawn butter recipe of their own among the sauces.
- Salting the waterDo not. The fish carries its own salt into the pan, and seasoning the poaching water only pushes it back in.
- The gridiron variationA gridiron is a set of bars over coals — a stovetop grill pan or a hot broiler stands in. Oil the bars rather than the fish, keep the pieces at least 3/4 inch thick so they hold together, and give them a few minutes a side. This is the better treatment for a thick loin cut.
- "A relish for tea"Tea here is the light evening meal, and a "relish" was a small savoury dish for it rather than a dinner plate.
- YieldReckon on 5 to 6 oz of soaked fish per person, which is roughly 4 oz dry weight. A pound of dry salt cod serves four with sauce and eggs.
Salt cod was one of the great staples of the inland American kitchen, and its presence in an Ohio book from 1877 is a small piece of economic history: dried and salted on the North Atlantic banks, it travelled by rail and river to households hundreds of miles from any coast, keeping for months without ice at a time when fresh sea fish simply could not. The pairing with a flour-thickened butter sauce and sliced hard-boiled egg is an old English convention for boiled white fish, and it survived in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century. Buckeye Cookery was assembled from contributions by named housekeepers — the attribution to Mrs. Lewis Brown here is typical of the book's method.