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Cod and Macaroni
Break the remains of cold cod into small pieces, having first removed the skin and bones. Take macaroni to the weight of the fish, and boil it until tender; drain, and cut into short lengths of an equal size. Make a little good melted butter, allowing a pint for a pound of cod and a pound of macaroni; season it with salt, cayenne, and the juice of a lemon; let it boil, draw it from the fire, and add the well-beaten yolk of an egg. Put the cod and macaroni with the sauce, and when they are quite hot, put the whole into a hot dish. The sauce must not boil after the egg is put in. Cover the mixture with grated bread-crumbs, and brown the top with a salamander or in a brisk oven. Time, one hour.
A Victorian way with leftover boiled cod, closer to a gratin than a pasta dish. Two things in the original will mislead a modern cook: what "melted butter" means, and how long the macaroni is actually meant to cook.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn English cookery of this period melted butter means a butter sauce thickened with a little flour and let down with water or milk to pouring consistency; the usual proportions run well in favour of the butter. A pint of plain melted butter poured over the fish would be inedible.
- The pintCassell's is British, so a pint here is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml) of finished sauce to a pound each of fish and macaroni. That is a generous, almost soupy ratio by current taste; 400 ml holds the dish together well enough.
- The egg yolk is the hingeThe sauce is drawn off the heat before the yolk goes in, and must not boil afterwards or it will curdle into threads. Temper the yolk with a ladle of hot sauce first, then return it, and keep the pan below a simmer.
- Macaroni timingNineteenth-century macaroni was often boiled twenty minutes or more and was expected to be soft. Modern dried macaroni wants 8-10 minutes, and slightly under is better here since it goes back into hot sauce and under the grill.
- SalamanderA salamander was an iron plate heated red in the fire and held over a dish to brown the top. An overhead grill or broiler on high does the same job in three or four minutes; watch it, as breadcrumbs over a butter sauce colour fast.
- "Brisk oven"Roughly 400-450F (200-230C). At that heat the top browns before the egg-thickened sauce beneath has time to split.
- SeasoningCayenne and lemon are doing the work of the whole dish, since cold boiled cod brings little of its own. Season the sauce assertively before the yolk goes in and taste again at the end.
- The fishAny cooked white fish will serve. Pick it over carefully for pin bones and skin, and add it in reasonably large flakes so it does not disappear into the macaroni.
- Time and yieldThe stated hour covers boiling the macaroni, making the sauce and browning; active work is nearer twenty-five minutes. A pound each of fish and macaroni feeds four to six.
Cassell's placed dishes like this in the long tradition of made-over or rechauffe cookery, where the point was to bring yesterday's boiled cod back to the table in a form nobody could complain about. Macaroni had been in English kitchens since the eighteenth century, generally treated as a vehicle for butter, cheese and cream rather than as an Italian dish in its own right. The construction here — a flour-thickened butter sauce enriched with egg yolk, a crumb topping, a fierce browning — is a common English gratin formula of the period, applied to fish, poultry and vegetables alike. The salamander named in the last line was still ordinary equipment in a coal-range kitchen, where heat from above was otherwise hard to come by.