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Cod, Salt, Rechauffe Of
Take the remains of salt cod; put the flesh, freed from skin and bone, into a pie-dish, pour the remains of the egg sauce over it, and pepper it lightly. Mash some potatoes with milk or butter, place these round the edge of the fish, and bake for about half an hour, or till the potatoes are brightly coloured. If no egg sauce has been left, the fish may be moistened with fresh melted butter. Probable cost, 8d.
A leftovers dish rather than a from-scratch one: cooked salt cod, its sauce, and a piped or spooned potato border, browned in the oven. Two Victorian terms in it mean something other than what a modern cook would assume.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery melted butter means a white sauce of butter, flour and water or milk, roughly the consistency of thin cream. Plain liquid butter will separate and leave the fish dry, so make a small quantity of simple béchamel if there is no egg sauce left over.
- Egg sauceThe other half of the classic salt cod service: melted butter sauce with hard-boiled eggs chopped through it. If you are making it fresh, allow two eggs to about a cup of sauce.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book leaves oven heat to the cook's judgement throughout. A moderately hot oven, around 400F/200C, for about the half-hour the recipe specifies will brown the potato without drying the fish, which is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- SaltSeason the potatoes and the sauce cautiously and taste before the dish goes in. Even well-soaked salt cod carries a lot of salt, and it concentrates as the dish bakes.
- Pie-dishA Victorian pie-dish was usually oval earthenware, made in a range of sizes. Any gratin or baking dish of moderate depth works; something very deep will steam the potato rather than colour it.
- Browning the potato"Brightly coloured" means genuinely browned at the ridges. Rough the surface with a fork or pipe it, and brush with a little butter or milk; smooth mash will simply go pale and dry.
- Yield and costThe recipe gives no yield; how far it goes depends entirely on how much cod is left. The 8d is given simply as the probable cost of the made dish.
Réchauffé is simply French for reheated, and Cassell's uses it as a heading across the book for the second appearance of a joint, a bird or a fish. Salt cod was a staple of Lent, bought stiff and dry, soaked for a day or more with several changes of water, then boiled and served with egg sauce and potatoes or parsnips — so leftovers of the kind this recipe addresses would have been familiar in many households. Dressing them under a potato border is the same economy that produced shepherd's pie and fish pie, and Victorian cookery writers took the reuse of cooked food seriously enough to give it its own department: waste was a moral failing as much as a financial one, and a dish that came back to the table looking like a new dish rather than a remnant was considered the mark of a competent kitchen.