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COD (a la Provencale)
Remove the skin and bones from the remains of cold cod, and break it into convenient-sized pieces. Mince finely equal quantities of shallot, young onions, and chives, parsley, and lemonpeel. Add a little grated nutmeg, salt, and pepper, and mix all well together with two table-spoonfuls of salad-oil. Place this in a pie-dish, put in the pieces of fish, and bake in a moderate oven. Serve very hot, with lemon-juice squeezed over the fish. Time, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold fish. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian way of using up cooked cod, dressed in the Provençal manner with oil, alliums and herbs. The method is sound; the timing is not.
- The timing is the problemThree-quarters of an hour will turn already-cooked cod to cotton wool. The fish only needs to heat through and take up the oil and aromatics — 15 to 20 minutes at the stated oven heat is ample, covered for the first part so it does not dry.
- "A moderate oven"Roughly 350F / 175C, though the term covered a range (about 325-375F) rather than a fixed setting. Cassell's readers had no thermometer and judged a coal range by other means.
- Salad-oilIn a Victorian British kitchen this generally meant olive oil. Use olive oil here — the dish is named for Provence and the oil is most of its character.
- Quantities are left to youNo amounts are given for the shallot, spring onions, chives, parsley or lemon peel beyond "equal quantities." A tablespoon of each, finely minced, suits about a pound of cooked fish; the two tablespoons of oil is the only fixed figure.
- Young onionsSpring onions or scallions. Use the white and pale green; the coarse green tops will not soften in the short bake.
- Lemon-peelThe coloured zest only, finely grated or minced. Any white pith baked into the herb mixture will turn bitter.
- Pie-dishAn ovenproof baking dish. The herb-and-oil mixture goes down first as a bed, with the flaked fish laid on top, so nothing catches on the base.
- Yield and costThe original serves three or four. The 6d. is the cost of the seasonings alone — this is a leftovers dish, and it assumes you already have poached or boiled cod in the larder.
À la provençale in nineteenth-century cookery books is a shorthand rather than a strict formula: olive oil instead of butter, plenty of alliums and parsley, and a squeeze of lemon at the table — the southern French manner as understood from a British kitchen. What is notable here is that garlic, the ingredient a French cook would consider essential, does not appear at all, its place taken by shallot, spring onion and chives — a shift often said to reflect an English wariness of garlic as too assertive for polite tables. The recipe also belongs to a whole genre in Cassell's: dishes built on "the remains of cold" something. A large boiled cod might well leave leftovers, and these could reappear the next day in a form that looked deliberate rather than thrifty — re-dressed with oil and herbs, baked, and sent up very hot.