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Cod Head, Browned
A cod's head in London is usually sold and served with the shoulders, but in some places it is cut off, and the rest of the fish retailed by the pound. As the head contains one or two of the tit-bits, namely, the tongue, the nape of the neck, and the gelatinous parts about the cheeks, it makes a very good dish. Take two or three heads, remove the eyes, wash the heads, drain them, sprinkle a little salt over them, and let them lie an hour or two; put them into boiling water, and boil them from ten to twenty minutes, according to the size. Take them out, drain them, remove the skin, and dredge a little flour equally over them. Place them before a clear fire, and baste them well with good dripping or butter. When they are lightly browned they are ready. Garnish with parsley and sliced lemon. For sauce, thicken a breakfast-cupful of the liquid in which the heads were boiled with a lump of butter rolled in flour. Boil this, stirring it all the time, till it is quite smooth; add a table-spoonful of lemon-juice, and send the sauce to table in a tureen. Probable cost of cods' heads, 2d. each. Sufficient, two or three for a dish.
A frugal Victorian dish that depends entirely on sourcing: cod heads are not a supermarket item, but a fishmonger who breaks down whole fish will usually part with them for very little or nothing. The rest is simple poach-then-brown technique.
- Buying the headsAsk for heads with the collar (the "shoulders") still attached — that is where most of the meat is, along with the cheeks, the throat latch and the small tongue. Use them the day they are cut; fish heads spoil faster than fillets. Have the gills pulled out as well as the eyes, since gills hold blood and grit and turn the poaching liquid bitter.
- "A breakfast-cupful"About 10 fl oz, or a generous 1 1/4 cups. Victorian cup sizes were not standardised, so treat it as the amount of poaching liquid that will make sauce for two or three heads rather than a precise figure.
- The salting hourThe salt-and-rest step is a dry brine. It firms the flesh so the head holds together when you lift it out of the water, and it seasons the interior. An hour is enough; more than two hours on so small a piece makes the fish noticeably salty.
- Poaching timeTen to twenty minutes at a hard boil is more than cod heads need. Bring the water to a boil, then drop to a bare simmer and give a large head about 12 minutes, a small one 8 — the cheek meat should just release from the bone. Violent boiling shreds the gelatinous parts the recipe is prizing.
- "Before a clear fire"This means propped in front of an open hearth and turned, not placed inside an oven. A broiler at its highest setting, 6 inches from the element, does the same job in 5 to 8 minutes; baste with melted butter or beef dripping two or three times and turn once so both cheeks colour.
- Dripping versus butterDripping is rendered fat from roast meat, usually beef, and it takes more heat than whole butter before it burns — worth using if you have it, since the flour dredge scorches easily under a broiler. Clarified butter is a reasonable substitute.
- The sauceA lump of butter rolled in flour is beurre manié — roughly equal weights, about 1 tablespoon each for this quantity. Whisk it into the simmering poaching liquid in small pieces and cook two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste, then add the lemon juice off the heat.
- YieldTwo or three heads serve two people as a main course, more as a first course. The eating is picking work: cheeks, tongue, the strip along the nape, and the flakes inside the collar.
Cassell's is blunt about the economics here — twopence a head. London fishmongers sold the head with the shoulders attached as a cheap cut in its own right, and the head was a recognised dish for respectable tables rather than a scrap: Mrs Beeton carries boiled cod's head and shoulders with oyster sauce, and similar dishes appear in other nineteenth-century manuals. What is being defended in the opening lines is the idea that the head holds "tit-bits" — the tongue, the nape, the gelatinous cheek — a position that Chinese, Portuguese and Scandinavian cooking has largely retained and that British cooking largely lost during the twentieth century, when filleting became the default and heads went to stockpots or fishmeal. Browning a poached head before the fire, rather than serving it plain boiled, was the way to lift a very cheap ingredient into something that looked like a roast.