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Pork and Codfish, Ragout Of
Take equal weights, say one pound of each, of pork and codfish, either pickled pork with fresh fish, or fresh pork with salt fish. Cut the pork into small slices, and flake the fish, which should be first boiled or steamed. Grease a dish, and sprinkle with pounded cracker biscuits to form a lining. Take a pint of stock, and make it into a sauce with salt, cayenne, mace, mixed herbs, mustard, and grated lemon-peel. Mix the flaked fish with this, and heat the whole. Fry the pork a little, season with the same materials used for the sauce, adding a little flavoured vinegar to taste. Put these materials in alternate layers in the dish, having fish and sauce top and bottom, and each layer of pork dredged with crumbs. Put plenty of crumbs on the top, with some bits of butter, then brown in a quick oven. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A layered bake of cod and pork bound with a spiced stock sauce and cracker crumbs. The original assumes you know how to make a sauce and how salt provisions behave, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Salt fish and pickled pork need soakingThe recipe pairs one salted element with one fresh one, but never says to desalt. Salt cod wants 24-48 hours of soaking in the refrigerator with several changes of water; pickled pork wants several hours at least. Skip it and the finished dish is inedible.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-450F. The dish goes in already hot, so the oven is mainly there to brown the crumbs and butter, perhaps 15-20 minutes.
- A pint of stockThis is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or 2.5 cups. It is a generous amount of liquid for two pounds of solids, and the sauce needs body: work about 2 oz butter and 2 oz flour into a roux first, or the layers will swim.
- Pounded cracker biscuitsHard water biscuits or ship's biscuit, crushed fine. Saltines or plain cream crackers are the closest modern stand-in; unsalted is safer given the cured meat or fish already in the dish.
- Mace and flavoured vinegarMace is the outer coating of nutmeg, warmer and less sharp; a quarter teaspoon ground is plenty. "Flavoured vinegar" means a household vinegar steeped with tarragon, chilli or shallot; use tarragon or cider vinegar, a teaspoon at a time.
- Cook the pork properlyFrying the slices "a little" was meant to render fat and colour them, not to cook them through. Cut them thin, no more than a quarter inch, and check that the assembled dish reaches 145F at the centre before the crumbs are browned.
- Flake the fish coarselyCod that has been boiled or steamed and then reheated in sauce and again in the oven will collapse into threads. Break it into large flakes and fold it into the sauce off the heat.
- YieldTwo pounds of solids plus sauce serves four to six as a main course, in a dish of about 2 quarts.
Cassell's was compiled for British households in the 1870s. Salt cod and salt pork were the two great keeping provisions of the North Atlantic trade, and dishes combining cod with fried salt pork or pork scraps are familiar from nineteenth-century American cookery, so the pairing has a New England resonance -- though the recipe itself is a British one and the connection is inference rather than a traced borrowing. Pounded hard biscuit could stand in for the breadcrumbs a British kitchen would otherwise use. The instruction to use one cured element with one fresh one is the practical heart of the recipe, a way of stretching whichever was to hand. At 1s 6d the dish belongs among Cassell's cheaper entries, built on barrelled provisions rather than the fishmonger's best.