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Cod Sound, Broiled
Prepare the sounds as in the preceding recipe. Scrape them clean, and simmer for half an hour; rub them with butter, and dredge with flour, season with salt and white pepper, and put them on the gridiron over a clear fire to broil. Make half a pint of good melted butter, and mix with it a tea-spoonful of mustard, a dessert-spoonful of soy, and a sprinkling of cayenne pepper. Heat it, and pour it over the broiled sounds. Time, about forty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. per pound. Sufficient, a quarter of a pound for each person.
Cod sounds are the fish's swim bladders — a cheap Victorian offal cut that has largely vanished from British and American fishmongers, though it survives in Newfoundland and in parts of Scandinavia. The recipe is straightforward once you know what "melted butter" and "soy" meant in 1880s kitchens.
- What a sound isNot the head or the roe: the swim bladder, a tough translucent membrane that turns gelatinous and slightly springy when cooked. Ask a fishmonger who breaks down whole cod, or look for salted cod sounds in Newfoundland and Nordic suppliers. Salted sounds need overnight soaking with several changes of water before the simmer.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn Victorian English cookery books this is not butter melted in a pan but a flour-thickened butter sauce, roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in an ounce of butter and let down with water or fish stock to the required half pint. Plain melted butter will not carry the mustard and soy the way the recipe intends.
- Soy"Soy" here means soy sauce, imported and sold in bottles alongside ketchup and Harvey's sauce as a savoury seasoning. A dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons. Use a dark soy or a Chinese light soy; it is doing the work of salt and colour, so taste before adding more salt.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml — more than a US half pint (8 fl oz, about 237 ml). That is a generous quantity of sauce for a pound of sounds, and you may want to make two-thirds of it.
- The half-hour simmer mattersThis is the hinge of the dish. Sounds are collagen-heavy and stay rubbery if broiled from raw; the simmer is what converts them to something tender enough to eat. Do not shorten it, and salt the simmering water lightly.
- Gridiron and clear fireA gridiron over a clear fire means bare bars over coals with no flame and no smoke. A hot grill pan or a broiler set high does the same job. After the simmer the sounds only need colour and a little crisping at the edges — five to eight minutes a side, not the full forty. The stated forty minutes is total time including the simmer.
- YieldA quarter pound per person, as given, is a light first course. A pound of prepared sounds serves four this way; scale the sauce with the fish.
Cassell's belongs to a generation of household dictionaries that took nose-to-tail thrift for granted, and cod sounds are a good example: they cost sixpence a pound, and were a by-product of the vast salt-cod trade that ran from the Newfoundland and Icelandic banks into British ports. Sounds were salted and barrelled in quantity, and English cookery treated them much as it treated tripe — a sharp, dark, bottled-sauce seasoning to give a bland gelatinous ingredient some backbone. The mustard, soy and cayenne dressing here is a very Victorian combination, the same flavour family as the anchovy-and-cayenne sauces poured over broiled bones and devilled kidneys. Sounds faded from British cooking as fish was increasingly sold filleted and offal fell out of favour, but they remain a home dish in Newfoundland, where fried cod sounds and scrunchions are still eaten.