Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cod, Stewed
Cod, Stewed
The tail of a cod is sometimes boiled like the rest of the fish, but it rarely proves a satisfactory dish, and is much better stewed or fried. Cut three pounds of cod into slices about an inch and a half in thickness, and fry these lightly in butter, or good dripping. Drain them from the fat, and put the slices into a stewpan with a pint of good stock, as much pounded mace as would lie on a fourpenny piece, and a pinch of cayenne; add three ounces of butter rubbed smoothly with a table-spoonful of flour, a dessert-spoonful of anchovy essence, a glass of sherry, and the juice of half a small lemon. Simmer for eight minutes, then add a dozen and a half oysters chopped small, with their liquor. Simmer two minutes more. Place the slices of cod on a hot dish, pour the sauce over, and serve immediately. Time, about twenty minutes. Probable cost of cod, when in season, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for six persons.
A Victorian way of rescuing the thin tail end of a large cod, where the flesh cooks unevenly in the pot. The sauce is built in the pan around the fish, so the whole thing lives or dies on gentle heat.
- Keep it at a bare simmerCod at 1.5-inch thickness overcooks fast and will shed its flakes into the sauce if the liquid moves much. Cooks often take cod off at an internal 130-140F, though official guidance is 145F. Hold the pan just below a tremble and turn the slices once with a spatula, not tongs.
- The oysters go in last for a reasonTwo minutes is correct and not a typo. Oysters held longer than that in hot liquid tighten and turn rubbery; they are here for their liquor and brine as much as their texture.
- Mace on a fourpenny pieceA fourpenny piece was a small silver coin, roughly the size of a dime, so this is something like a scant 1/8 teaspoon of mace. Mace is the aril covering the nutmeg seed, sold both as whole blades and ground; the recipe's 'pounded' points to blades. Use less than instinct suggests.
- A glass of sherryVictorian recipes mean a wine glass, generally 2 to 2.5 fl oz. A dry amontillado or fino suits the anchovy and oyster better than a cream sherry.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty anchovy extract, harder to find now but still sold in Britain. A teaspoon of anchovy paste loosened in a little of the stock does the same work; taste before adding salt anywhere else.
- Butter and flourThe three ounces of butter rubbed with a tablespoon of flour follows the beurre manie method, worked in cold; but at that ratio it is far more enrichment than thickening. Three ounces is generous by modern taste and can be halved without harming the sauce.
- Stock'good stock' is left unspecified; a fish stock or a light veal stock suits this dish better than beef. Cod trimmings and the tail bones simmered twenty minutes with an onion give a better result than anything from a carton.
- The frying stepFry the slices only to colour, perhaps a minute a side. They finish in the sauce, and fish browned through will be dry by the time it reaches the dish.
- YieldThree pounds of cod on the bone serves six as written; boneless fillet at that weight will stretch to eight. Serve with plain boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
Cassell's treats the cod tail as a problem to be solved, which tells you how the fish arrived in a Victorian kitchen: whole, large, and sold by the pound at eightpence, with the thick middle cut commanding the price and the thin end left to be made interesting. The anchovy-and-oyster sauce was the standard English answer, a pairing that runs through nineteenth-century fish cookery because both were cheap, intensely savoury, and preserved well - bottled anchovy essence and oyster liquor did the work that fish stock and glutamate-rich seasonings do now. Oysters in particular were still an everyday food in Britain when this book was compiled in the 1870s and 80s, before the native beds went into a decline generally attributed to overfishing, pollution and severe winters, turning a dozen and a half chopped oysters from a thrifty flourish into an expensive one.