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Copfish A La Mode
Tea-cup codfish picked up fine, two cups mashed potatoes, one pint cream or milk, two eggs well beaten, half tea-cup butter, salt and pepper; mix well, bake in baking-dish from twenty to twentyfive minutes. -Mrs. E. L. Fay, New York City.
A salt-cod and potato pudding of the kind that turned up on Friday tables and at breakfast alike. The original assumes you know how to handle salt fish, so that is where to start.
- The fish is salt cod"Codfish picked up fine" means dried salt cod shredded by hand. It must be soaked before it goes anywhere near the potatoes: 12 to 24 hours in cold water, changed three or four times, then simmered briefly and flaked. Skip this and the dish is inedibly salty. Modern boneless salt cod fillet needs the shorter end of that range.
- Teacup and tea-cupA Victorian tea-cup in American cookbooks is reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the books are inconsistent and some treat it as a full cup. Half a tea-cup of butter is roughly 5 to 6 tablespoons, which is generous; 4 tablespoons is plenty for this quantity.
- No oven temperature is givenBuckeye Cookery predates oven thermostats. Bake at 350F. Twenty to twenty-five minutes is right for a shallow dish; a deep one will need 35 to 40 minutes, until the centre is set and the top browned.
- Cream or milkA pint is a lot of liquid against two cups of potato, and the mixture will pour rather than mound. That is intended, the eggs setting it into a soft pudding. If you want a firmer, spoonable dish, use a cup and a half.
- Salt with restraintThe instruction to add salt assumes the cod has been thoroughly freshened. Taste the soaked fish first and in most cases add none at all; pepper is the useful seasoning here.
- Mashed potatoesThe recipe most likely assumes leftover mash, and cold mash tends to work better than fresh, which can go gluey when beaten with cream. Mash without added milk if you are making it specially.
- YieldServes four as a main course, six as part of a larger meal. Best eaten hot from the dish; it firms up considerably on standing and reheats poorly.
Salt cod was one of the great staples of nineteenth-century American cookery, cheap, shelf-stable, and available far inland long before refrigerated shipping — which is why an Ohio compilation like Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (first published in 1877) carries a whole run of codfish dishes despite sitting hundreds of miles from salt water. The name appears to be a garbling of "Codfish à la Mode," though whether the slip was typographical in origin or crept in later cannot be determined; "à la mode" in the household books of the period rarely meant anything technical, functioning instead as a general mark of fashionableness attached to a dish that had been dressed up beyond plain boiling. What the recipe actually describes belongs to the family of fish puddings and scallops that let a contributor stretch soaked salt fish with potato, cream and egg into something that could be sent to the table in its baking dish. The attribution to Mrs. E. L. Fay of New York City is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions solicited from housekeepers across a number of states.