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COD, BAKED (another way)
Prepare the fish as in the last recipe; brush it over with beaten egg, strew some finely-grated bread-crumbs on it, and put it in a dish with three or four lumps of butter on it. Baste it frequently, and turn it over that it may be equally cooked throughout. Some persons place the fish on a drainer over a deep dish, in which is placed a carrot, a turnip, an onion, a cupful of water, and the juice of a lemon. The fish is then basted frequently with butter, but it must not touch either the vegetables or the water. Serve either with melted butter, oyster sauce, shrimp sauce, or sauce supreme. Time to bake, about one hour. Probable cost of cod, 8d. per pound when in full season. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain baked cod in the Victorian manner, written for a thick cut of a large fish rather than the thin fillets sold today. The two methods given — buttered dish and rack-over-aromatics — behave quite differently, and the timing belongs to the first.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; a coal range had no dial to set. The recipe names no heat at all, so this is modern guidance rather than the book's: a moderate oven of around 350F will brown the crumb coating without the butter burning.
- The hour is for a whole joint of fishAn hour assumes a two- to three-pound middle cut or head-and-shoulders piece on the bone, several inches thick. A modern loin or fillet is done in 15 to 25 minutes. Cook to the point where the flesh parts from the bone and is just opaque, around 145F at the centre.
- Basting is the hingeCod is lean and has nothing to protect it but the butter you put on it. Frequent basting is not a flourish; skipped, the crumbs scorch and the flesh dries. Keep the butter spooned over every ten minutes or so.
- Turning the fishThis instruction makes sense for a thick piece cooked in a shallow dish over a fierce, uneven range floor. In a modern fan or conventional oven a thick cut needs no turning, and turning it will break the crumb crust.
- The drainer methodPlacing the fish on a rack above a carrot, turnip, onion, a cup of water and lemon juice is aromatic steam-roasting. The point of "it must not touch" is that the fish should not stew in the liquid. The vegetables and their liquor are flavouring only, though they make a serviceable base for the sauce.
- Bread-crumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs grated from stale crumb, closer to fine dried crumbs than to fresh soft ones. Panko is coarser and will give a different, shaggier crust.
- The saucesMelted butter here is the Victorian flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply clarified butter. Oyster and shrimp sauces are usually that same base with the shellfish and their liquor stirred in. Sauce suprême is classically a chicken velouté finished with cream, an unexpected partner for fish.
- Yield and costFive or six servings implies roughly a three-pound piece. The eightpence a pound is a note on seasonal market price and has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Cod was the great everyday sea fish of Victorian Britain, landed in bulk from the North Sea banks and carried inland by rail, which is why a dictionary of cookery of this period can quote a confident per-pound price "when in full season" — the season being winter, when cod is firm and roed. The egg-and-crumb treatment is a standard nineteenth-century way of giving a lean white fish a surface that browns. The alternative given here, raising the fish on a drainer above vegetables and water, keeps the perfume of the aromatics without the fish going sodden, and the book offers it as something "some persons" do rather than as a rule.