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Cod, Fried (Take the remains of cold cod)
Take the remains of cold cod. Break it into pieces about two inches long and one broad, and dip each into a light batter. Fry them in hot lard or dripping. Put them on blotting paper to clear them from the fat, pile them on a dish, and garnish with fried parsley. Time, three or four minutes to fry.
A leftovers dish from an era when a boiled cod was bought whole and rarely finished at one meal. It works, but the fish is already cooked, so the batter is the only thing that needs time in the fat.
- Fat and temperature"Hot lard or dripping" gives no temperature, and the recipe does not say whether the fat is deep or shallow; modern practice for frying battered fish is roughly 350-375F. Below that the batter absorbs grease before it sets, and the three to four minutes given suggests fat hot enough to seal it quickly.
- A light batterTypically flour slackened with water or milk, sometimes lightened with beaten egg white. Aim for something that coats the back of a spoon and no thicker, since the fish beneath is already cooked and cannot take a long fry.
- Blotting paperVictorian kitchens kept sheets of unsized blotting paper for draining fried food. Kitchen paper on a rack does the same job; a rack alone is better still, as paper flat on a plate steams the underside.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry curly parsley sprigs dropped into the hot fat for about ten seconds, until they stop hissing and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley will spit violently, so dry it thoroughly first.
- Bones and skinCold boiled cod flakes off the bone easily, but the recipe's neat two-inch by one-inch pieces are optimistic. Lift the flesh in the largest intact flakes you can and discard skin, bones and any dark membrane before battering.
- Leftover safetyCooked fish kept refrigerated should be used within two days, and this reheating is brief. The pieces need to come out hot through the middle, not merely crisp outside.
- YieldThe remains of a family cod, perhaps 12 oz to 1 lb of picked flesh, will serve three or four as a light course with lemon and a sharp sauce.
Cassell's belongs to a tradition of British household books built around the assumption that nothing leaves the kitchen uneaten. Cod was the everyday white fish of nineteenth-century Britain, landed in enormous quantity from the North Sea and Icelandic waters and sold cheap enough that a whole boiled fish with oyster or egg sauce was standard middle-class fare; the sizeable remainder then reappeared as fish cakes, fish pie, or -- as here -- battered and fried. The technique is the same one that was, at the same period, being sold from street stalls and early fried-fish shops in London and the industrial north, though those used raw fish; the pairing with fried potatoes that became fish and chips is generally traced to the 1860s. Fried parsley as a garnish appears throughout Victorian cookery for anything deep-fried, a way of using the fat already hot and putting some colour on a plate of uniform brown.