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Cod, with Mashed Potatoes
Take the remains of cold cod and the same weight in mashed potatoes, remove the skin and bones from the fish, to every pound of which allow one tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of white pepper, and one or two grains of cayenne; pound all together to a smooth paste, with a little butter, oil, or cream. Place the mixture in a well-buttered dish, roughen the top with a fork, and bake it in a moderate oven. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost for cod, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A leftovers dish of the plainest kind: equal weights of cooked cod and mashed potato, seasoned hard and baked until the ridged top colours. The seasoning quantities are the part worth reading twice.
- Moderate ovenSet 350F/180C. The mixture is already cooked through, so the twenty minutes is about heating it to the centre and browning the roughened surface — not about cooking fish.
- Check the fish before you poundCod flakes hide fine pin bones and the odd cartilaginous strip near the collar. Once it is pounded to a paste they are impossible to find, so break the flesh up with your fingers first.
- The salt is aggressiveA level teaspoon per pound of fish is around 1.3 percent by weight of the fish alone, and the potato is unsalted in this recipe. If your cod was poached in salted water or was salt cod, taste the mixture before adding any.
- Cayenne by the grain"One or two grains" indicates a very small quantity, a few specks off the point of a knife rather than a measured amount. Cayenne varies in strength, so start at the low end.
- Butter, oil, or creamNo quantity is given; work in enough to bring the paste together and keep it from drying in the oven — roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons per pound of mixture. Cream gives the softest result, butter the best flavour.
- Roughening the topThis is the whole visual point of the dish. Drag a fork across the surface in ridges; the raised edges brown while the hollows stay moist. A smooth top bakes pale and dull.
- Pounded, not whippedA mortar is what the word implies. Overworking mashed potato releases starch and turns it gluey, and the recipe does direct that everything be pounded together to a smooth paste.
- Yield and servingThree or four as written; the seasoning is reckoned per pound of fish, with an equal weight of potato. It wants something sharp alongside -- a wedge of lemon, parsley sauce, or pickled beetroot.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the reheated remnant, when a middle-class household bought fish whole and expected the kitchen to account for every scrap of it. The book's own note — "probable cost for cod, 8d. per pound" — shows why: cod was the cheap white fish of the British table, brought inland by rail from the trawling ports, but it was not so cheap that a cook could throw away half of Friday's dinner. Dishes of this shape, cooked fish pounded with potato and browned in a buttered dish, run through nineteenth-century English cookery under a dozen names, and they sit close to the fried version we now call the fishcake. The heavy hand with white pepper and cayenne is characteristic of the period's treatment of leftovers.