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COD (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Boil two slices of cod, as in the last recipe. Wash some fresh green parsley in two or three waters. Chop it small, and knead two table-spoonfuls of it with two ounces of fresh butter. an ounce of flour, a little salt and cayenne, and the juice of half a lemon. Put this mixture into a saucepan with half a pint of milk, and stir it over a gentle fire until it is on the point of boiling. Add another half ounce of butter, and when it is melted pour the sauce over the fish and serve. The sauce may be made by stirring a table-spoonful of finely-chopped parsley in a pint of good melted butter. Mix well, season with salt and cayenne, add the juice of half a lemon, and, just before serving, draw the sauce back, and add, very gradually, the well-beaten yolks of two eggs. Time, altogether, about forty minutes. Probable cost, about 8d. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian parsley butter sauce over poached cod, given in two versions. The one thing to understand before starting is that "melted butter" in a nineteenth-century English cookbook is not butter you have melted.
- "Melted butter" means a sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery melted butter is a cooked flour-and-butter sauce, slaked with water or milk, about the consistency of thin cream; the proportions vary from book to book. The second version calls for a pint of it, so make the sauce first as a separate operation; a pint of actual liquid butter would be inedible.
- Kneaded butter, not a rouxThe first version works like a beurre maniée: butter, flour, parsley and seasoning worked together cold, then stirred into the milk as it heats. Stir steadily so the flour disperses before it sets in lumps.
- Do not let it boilBring the milk sauce only to the point of boiling, as written. The second version is more delicate: once the egg yolks go in the sauce must stay off direct heat, below roughly 180F, or it will curdle. "Draw the sauce back" means move the pan off the direct heat.
- Imperial measuresA Victorian pint is 20 fl oz, half a pint 10 fl oz. Two ounces of butter is half a stick; an ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup.
- Poaching the codThe "last recipe" is not reproduced here, so its method cannot be quoted; boiled cod of this period is generally simmered gently in salted water. Two thick cod steaks need only a few minutes, until the flesh parts from the bone. The recipe's forty minutes is given as "altogether", covering the whole dish, sauce included, not the fish alone.
- CayenneUsed here as a seasoning rather than a heat source. A pinch is the intended proportion for the quantity of sauce.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both work, but chop it just before use and squeeze it dry after washing, or the water will thin the sauce and dull the colour.
- YieldFour to five as written assumes fish as one course among several. As a main course with potatoes, two cod steaks and this quantity of sauce serve two or three.
À la maître d'hôtel — literally "in the manner of the household steward" — is French kitchen shorthand for the simplest possible dressing of butter, chopped parsley, lemon and salt; the name is often said to point to a dish plain enough to be assembled without a saucier, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. The version here, written for English households with one cook and an eye on cost, absorbed the name but anglicised the substance: both versions thicken the butter with flour, and the second finishes with egg yolks in the manner of the English "melted butter" that ran through British cookery from the eighteenth century until French sauce-making displaced it. The note of "about 8d. per pound" is a reminder of what cod once was in Britain — a cheap, abundant, everyday fish, landed in bulk.