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COD (a la Franoise)
Take two slices of cod about an inch and a half in thickness. Put them in salt and water for a few minutes, then drain, and fry them in hot butter till they are half cooked. Cover them with good stock, stew them until tender, then place them on a hot dish, and pour over them a pint of sauce, made as follows. Put a break-fast-cupful of nicely-flavoured stock into a saucepan with half the quantity of thick cream; let it boil, draw it back, and when cool, add salt and pepper, half a tea-spoonful of lemon, half a tea-spoonful of garlic vinegar, and half a tea-spoonful of sifted sugar. Time, altogether, from forty to fifty minutes. Probable cost of cod, 6d. to 8d. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian braise of cod steaks finished with a thin cream sauce sharpened with lemon and garlic vinegar. The method is sound; the timings and the sauce quantities need attention.
- The hinge: stop cooking the fish earlyThe stated 40-50 minutes is for the whole operation, not for the fish. Inch-and-a-half cod steaks need only a few minutes a side in the butter and roughly 8-10 minutes barely simmering in the stock, until the flesh parts from the bone. Cod held at a stew for half an hour turns dry and cottony.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup in British books of this period is usually reckoned at somewhere between 8 and 10 fl oz (say 1 to 1 1/4 US cups). Half that quantity of cream is 4-5 fl oz.
- The pint of sauce does not add upTen ounces of stock plus five of cream falls well short of an imperial pint (20 fl oz), and boiling only takes it further down. Either scale both up by half, or accept that you will have appreciably less than the pint the book promises. Reducing the stock before adding the cream gives better flavour at the cost of more volume lost.
- Half a tea-spoonful of lemonMost likely lemon juice. Add it, and the vinegar, off the heat as directed; acid dropped into boiling cream can split it. "Cool" here means below a simmer, not cold; the sauce should still be hot when it goes over the fish.
- Garlic vinegarA store-cupboard item of the period, made by steeping peeled cloves in vinegar for some days or weeks. A modern equivalent is white wine vinegar with a crushed clove left in it for a few days, or simply the vinegar plus a scrape of garlic.
- Sifted sugarCaster sugar. Half a teaspoon is a seasoning, not a sweetener — it is there to round off the vinegar.
- The salt and water soakA few minutes in brine firms the flesh and draws out any blood along the bone. Drain and pat thoroughly dry before frying or the butter will spit and the fish will not colour.
- Stock"Good stock" is unspecified here, but a light stock suits the pale sauce better than a dark beef one. Fish stock made from the cod trimmings, or a mild chicken stock, keeps the sauce pale.
- YieldFour to five portions as the book says. Two large steaks will serve three generously by modern plating.
Cassell's included many dishes labelled "à la française," a phrase that in late-Victorian British cookery often signalled little more precise than a butter-and-cream finish rather than the plain boiled fish with egg sauce that was the English default. Cod was a workhorse fish of the period — the sixpence to eightpence a pound quoted here puts it well below salmon or turbot — and much of the ingenuity in books like this one went into dressing a cheap fish so that it read as a made dish. The garlic vinegar is the telling detail: flavoured vinegars, garlic, tarragon, chilli, elder, were kept in the Victorian store cupboard as a way of carrying pungent flavours through the winter, and garlic often appeared in English cooking in this diluted, bottled form rather than raw.