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Cod Sound, Fricasseed
Soak, scrape, and boil as many cod sounds as may be required. Drain them, and put them into a stewpan with sufficient white stock to cover them; season the sauce with salt, pepper, and powdered mace, thicken it with a lump of butter rolled in flour, and, just before serving it, squeeze in the juice of a lemon. Serve with toasted sippets. Time to boil, half an hour. Sufficient, a quarter of a pound for each person. Probable cost, 6d. per pound.
A Victorian dish built on a cut almost nobody sells now. The work is all in the soaking and cleaning; the sauce is a plain velouté finished with lemon.
- What a cod sound isThe swim bladder, a pale membranous strip taken from the fish's backbone cavity — not the tongue, throat or roe. Historically sold salted and dried in barrels; today you would need to ask a whole-fish supplier, or look for salted sounds in Scandinavian, Newfoundland or Chinese dried-seafood shops (where they are sold as fish maw).
- Soaking, if saltedDried or salted sounds need 12–24 hours in several changes of cold water before they are pliable enough to scrape. Fresh sounds need only a rinse. The opening instruction to soak suggests the salted kind, though the recipe still calls for salt when seasoning the sauce.
- Scraping is the hingeBoth faces carry a slippery membrane and darkish deposits that stay tough and taste muddy if left on. Rub with coarse salt and scrape with the back of a knife under running water until the sound is uniformly white and slightly translucent.
- Half an hour is for salt soundsSoaked salted sounds do want 20–30 minutes to turn tender and gelatinous. Fresh sounds are done in 8–10 minutes; boiled the full half hour they collapse into glue.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, lightly seasoned and not reduced to a glaze. A mild fish stock works and is closer to modern taste. Use enough to barely cover, since it becomes the sauce.
- Butter rolled in flourBeurre manié — equal weights soft butter and flour kneaded together, roughly 1 oz of each per pint of liquid. Whisk it in a little at a time off the boil, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour.
- Mace and lemonPowdered mace is the dried aril, the lacy husk that surrounds the nutmeg seed; a scant quarter teaspoon per pint is plenty. Add the lemon juice with the pan off the heat and avoid reboiling, so the butter-thickened sauce does not thin or separate.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toasted or fried bread set round the dish to soak up the sauce. Crustless white bread, cut after toasting.
- YieldA quarter pound of prepared sounds per person, so 1 lb serves four as a first course. Cassell's sixpence a pound reflects a cheap byproduct cut, which is the whole point of the dish.
Cod sounds belong to the long tradition of using every part of a fish that could be dried, barrelled and shipped inland. In the salt-cod trade of the North Atlantic the sounds were stripped out during processing and sold separately and cheaply; Newfoundland and Norway both exported them, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookbooks give them fried in batter, boiled with egg sauce, or fricasseed as here. The gelatinous texture that made them prized — much the same quality that keeps fish maw central in Chinese cooking — is plausibly what pushed them off British tables once fresh fish became cheap and widely available by rail and refrigeration. The recipe follows the standard fricassee pattern: a plain boiled ingredient, a thickened white sauce, an acid finish, and sippets to serve. The price note is a reminder of how this book was used. Sixpence a pound put cod sounds among the cheaper animal foods on offer, below most butcher's meat, which is why a middle-class household manual bothered to explain them at all.