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Codlings, Sauce For
Cod and codlings should be sent to table with oyster sauce and good melted butter. The melted butter should be of the consistency of light batter, as it has to be flavoured either with essence of anchovy, lemon-juice, chilli vinegar, or mushroom ketchup. A good sauce for boiled cod is made as follows. Simmer very gently together, for half an hour, a cupful of water, a cupful of vinegar, two shallots, and a tea-spoonful of the essence of anchovies. Strain the liquid, and add two table-spoonfuls of good cream, and the well-beaten yolks of two eggs. The sauce must not be allowed to boil up after the eggs are added.
Two sauces are described: the standard English "melted butter" served with boiled cod, and a sharper egg-thickened vinegar sauce given in full. The second is the one worth making, and its whole success rests on the last sentence.
- The hinge: no boiling after the eggsOnce the yolks and cream go in, keep the pan below a simmer — around 160-175F — and stir constantly until it coats a spoon. A boil will scramble the yolks, and the vinegar should not be relied on to protect against curdling. Off the heat with a bowl of cold cream to hand is the safest way to finish it.
- CodlingsA codling is a small young cod, not an apple. Any firm white fish of a pound or two behaves the same way here; the sauce suits hake, pollock or haddock equally.
- "Melted butter"In Victorian English cookery this is not simply butter melted but a flour-thickened butter sauce, roughly 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of water or milk. "Consistency of light batter" means pourable but coating — thick enough that the added anchovy or lemon juice will not thin it to water.
- CupfulCassell's cup is not standardised; a Victorian teacup runs about 5-6 fl oz, a modern cup 8. What matters is that water and vinegar are equal, so measure with the same vessel and the proportion holds.
- Vinegar strengthVinegar strengths of the period are hard to pin down and varied by maker and type. Taste the strained liquid before adding cream and yolks; if it makes you wince, dilute with a little more water or fish cooking liquor.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin salty anchovy extract, close to modern anchovy essence sold in bottles. Anchovy paste from a tube works if slackened with a spoonful of water, but it is saltier — start with half a teaspoon and salt the finished sauce last.
- Oyster sauceThe oyster sauce meant here is an English white sauce with poached oysters and their liquor stirred in, nothing like bottled Chinese oyster sauce. If you make it, the oysters go in at the very end and need barely a minute; longer and they toughen.
- Chilli vinegarSimply vinegar steeped with dried red chillies for a week or two. A few drops of any hot vinegar-based pepper sauce serves the same purpose.
- YieldThe quantities give roughly a cup of finished sauce — enough for four to six portions of fish. Strain again after thickening if the shallot has left threads.
Boiled cod with melted butter and oyster sauce was among the familiar English fish courses of the nineteenth century, cheap enough for a weeknight and respectable enough for a dinner table. The second sauce belongs to an older family of sharp vinegar-and-egg sauces for plain boiled fish, a line that runs back through eighteenth-century English cookery and shares its logic with Dutch and French egg-thickened sauces — acid, aromatics, yolks, and heat kept deliberately low. "Codling" for a young cod is now largely a fishmonger's word, and the spelling collides with the codlin apple, which is why the title reads oddly to modern eyes.