Home › The Principles of Cookery › Codlings, to Dress
Codlings, to Dress
Codlings may be either baked, boiled, or fried. To bake them: Flour the fish, salt and pepper it, and lay it in a pan with a little cold water, an onion stuck with four or five cloves, and a bunch of sweet herbs. Put a piece of butter on the top, and bake it in a moderate oven. When sufficiently cooked, take out the fish carefully, strain the gravy, thicken it with a little flour, and add a tea-spoonfuls of the essence of anchovies and two table-spoonfuls of Harvey's sauce. Let it boil, pour it round the fish, and garnish with slices of lemon. To boil: put the fish into boiling water, and let them boil very gently until the flesh leaves the bone easily. Serve with parsley or anchovy sauce. To fry: Rub the codlings with flour, then brush them well with egg, dip them in bread-crumbs, and fry them in plenty of hot lard or dripping. When a thick smoke rises from them they will be ready. Drain them from the fat, and serve with shrimp or oyster sauce. Time: to bake, three-quarters of an hour; to boil, a quarter of an hour; to fry, ten minutes. Sufficient, one codling for two persons. Probable cost, 8d. or 1s. each.
A codling here is a small young cod, usually a pound or two whole, not the apple of the same name. The three methods are sound; only the frying cue needs rewriting.
- Ignore "a thick smoke rises"Smoking fat means the lard or dripping has passed its smoke point and is breaking down. Fry at 350-375F and judge by colour and time: a crumbed fillet needs 3-4 minutes a side, a small whole fish 8-10 minutes total.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. Three-quarters of an hour suits a whole fish of about 1.5-2 lb; fillets in the same pan will want considerably less. The flesh should be opaque and part cleanly at the thickest point.
- Harvey's sauceA spiced, anchovy-based bottled sauce, widely used in Victorian English kitchens. It is no longer easy to find; Worcestershire sauce is the nearest thing, and two tablespoons is assertive in a small pan of gravy, so add half and taste.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin anchovy extract, saltier and looser than modern paste. Use about half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or a teaspoon of colatura, in place of the spoonful called for.
- Boiling means barely simmeringFish dropped into rolling water shreds. Bring the water to the boil, salt it well, slide the fish in and hold it just below a simmer. A quarter of an hour is right for a whole small cod; fillets need five to seven minutes.
- The baking liquid'A little cold water' means a shallow amount, not enough to poach the fish, or the strained gravy will be thin and washed out.
- ThickeningFlour stirred straight into hot gravy will lump. Work it into softened butter first as a beurre manie, whisk in off the heat, then boil for a minute to cook out the raw taste.
- Sweet herbsA bundle of herbs such as parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf, tied together. Remove it, and the clove-studded onion, before straining.
- YieldOne codling for two people holds up if the fish is around 1.5 lb whole. Boiled potatoes and the named sauce complete it.
Cassell's is writing for households buying at the fishmonger's slab, where cod was sold by size and name: the full-grown cod, and the codling, a young fish of a pound or two, cheap enough at eightpence to a shilling to be an everyday dinner. The four sauces named at the end - parsley, anchovy, shrimp, oyster - are the standard Victorian white-sauce repertoire for boiled and fried fish, all built on the same butter-and-flour base and distinguished only by what was stirred in. Harvey's sauce, called for in the baked version, belongs to the same era: one of the many bottled sauces sold from the late eighteenth century onward, whose recipes hinged on anchovy, soy and vinegar. It has since largely disappeared while Worcestershire survived.