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COD (a l'Ostende)
Make a batter with flour, egg, and milk, and let it stand for several hours. Take one pound and a half of cod, and cut it into two thick slices. Divide these into little fillets about two inches across, dip them into the batter, and fry in boiling fat or oil till they are of a pale golden brown. Fry eight or ten oysters lightly in a little butter, without allowing them to harden. Arrange the fillets on a folded serviette, and place an oyster on each. Garnish with parsley or watercress. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A plain fried cod recipe from the era when a fish course arrived on a folded napkin. The proportions are left to the cook, so the batter is the only part that needs thought.
- The batter, unmeasuredCassell's gives no quantities here. A workable frying batter is about 4 oz (1 cup) flour, 1 egg and enough milk to reach thick cream consistency — roughly 5-6 fl oz. The long rest matters more than the exact ratio: it lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, so the coating fries crisp rather than tough. Two hours in the refrigerator is enough; several is fine.
- "Boiling fat or oil"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the batter hits it. Use 350-375F. Below that the batter drinks oil, above it the coating colours before the fish is set.
- Cutting the fishOne and a half pounds of cod cut into two thick slices most likely means steaks cut across the fish, though the recipe does not say whether they are bone in. Skinless loin fillet cut into two-inch fingers gives much the same result with less work. Keep the pieces thick — thin strips overcook before they brown.
- The oysters are the hinge"Without allowing them to harden" is the whole instruction. Oysters need about a minute in foaming butter, until the edges just ruffle and they turn opaque. Anything past two minutes and they shrink and go rubbery, which defeats the point of putting one on each fillet. Note that briefly warmed oysters are not fully cooked; anyone avoiding raw shellfish should cook them through and accept the texture.
- Draining and the servietteThe folded napkin was there to absorb fat and keep the fish from steaming on a hot plate. A rack over paper does the job better, and the fish can go onto a warmed platter at the last moment.
- YieldA pound and a half of cod with eight to ten oysters serves four as a fish course, or two to three as a main plate with potatoes.
- The cost line1s. 3d. is 15 old pence for the whole dish. Cod was cheap, and oysters, though dearer by the time this book was compiled than they had been earlier in the century, were still far less of a luxury than they are now.
Ostend, on the Belgian coast, was a working fishing and oyster port and a fashionable seaside resort in the nineteenth century, and its name attached itself to a run of restaurant dishes combining white fish with oysters hethshorthand "à l'Ostende" generally signals an oyster garnish rather than any single fixed preparation. Cassell's gives the recipe as a dictionary entry under COD, in a tradition where fried fish served dry on a napkin was a set piece of the English dinner: the batter rest, the fat at the right heat, the oyster barely kissed with butter.