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COD (a la Bechamel)
Remove the flesh from the bones of a cooked cod and break it into convenient pieces. Put a cupful of white stock, nicely seasoned, and a cupful of new milk, into a saucepan; thicken it with a little flour and butter, put the pieces of fish into it, and let them remain until quite hot, but the sauce must not be allowed to boil. Serve with the sauce and fish in the middle of a hot dish, and place a border of mashed potatoes pound it. Time, twenty minutes.
A leftovers dish in disguise: it assumes you already have a boiled cod from a previous meal. Everything hinges on gentle heat, because the fish is cooked twice and the sauce is barely a sauce at all.
- Do not let it boilThe instruction is the whole recipe. Cod that has already been poached will shred and turn cottony if the liquid bubbles; hold the pan just below a simmer, at a bare steam, long enough to heat the pieces through, which is a matter of a few minutes. The stated twenty minutes appears to cover the whole operation, sauce included, rather than the reheating alone.
- Cook the roux first, then add liquidThickening -- "thicken it with a little flour and butter" may mean either a cooked roux or butter and flour worked to a paste and whisked into the hot liquid; both were current practice. Reckon on roughly 1 oz each of butter and flour for the two cupfuls of liquid here. If you make a roux, cook it a minute or two before the milk and stock go in and whisk as it comes up to a simmer; dry flour stirred into hot liquid gives lumps and a pasty taste.
- A cupfulIn British cookery of this date a cupful is usually reckoned at about half a pint, so somewhere in the region of 8 to 10 fl oz; the two cupfuls give roughly a pint of sauce. That is generous for the flesh of a small cod or the remains of a large steak; reduce proportionally if you are working with a pound or less of fish.
- New milkFresh unskimmed milk, straight from the dairy and never separated. Whole milk is the equivalent. Skim or low-fat milk will make a thin, chalky sauce.
- White stockA pale, unroasted stock, in Victorian usage generally veal and sometimes chicken, with no browning and no tomato. Chicken stock works; use it unsalted or the finished sauce will be over-seasoned, and season at the end rather than the start.
- The potato border"Place a border of mashed potatoes pound it" is a typesetting slip for "round it". Pipe or spoon a ring of stiff mashed potato round the edge of the serving dish and put the fish and sauce in the well. The potato needs to be dry and firm or it will slump into the sauce.
- Bones and skinCod flakes off the frame easily once cool, but go over the flesh with your fingers for pin bones before it goes into the sauce. Discard the skin; it turns slippery on reheating.
- YieldOn this quantity of sauce, the flesh from a cooked cod tail of about 2 lb would serve three or four with the potatoes, though the recipe itself gives no yield.
Bechamel is the French mother sauce that carries a person's name, traditionally credited to Louis de Bechameil, a steward in the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is a courtier's flattery rather than documented invention, and versions of the milk-thickened sauce predate him. By the time Cassell's was compiled in late Victorian Britain, the sauce had an obvious domestic use: cod was cheap and plentiful, and a boiled fish left a good deal of flesh behind. Recipes of this kind sit throughout the book as a matter of thrift, dressing yesterday's dinner well enough to send it back to the table without apology.