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SALT FISH (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Boil the fish in the usual way, free the flesh from skin and bone, and tear it into flakes. Mix a dessert-spoonful of flour smoothly with two or three ounces of good butter. Stir them in a clean saucepan till the butte is dissolved, then add a pinch of salt and the third of a pint of boiling water. Stir the whole over the fire for a few minutes, and add a table-spoonful of chilli vinegar and a table-spoonful of chopped parsley. Let all boil up once. Put the flaked fish into a saucepan, pour the sauce over it, and stir it over a gentle fire till it is quite hot. Turn it upon a hot dish, put round it boiled parsnips or mashed potatoes, and serve. The remains of cold salt fish may be dressed in this way. Time, a few minutes to heat the fish in the sauce. Probable cost, 4d. to 10d. per pound.
A Victorian way of using up cooked salt cod in a parsley butter sauce. The recipe assumes you already know the soaking and poaching that come first, which is where most of the work lies.
- Soak the fish first"Boil the fish in the usual way" takes for granted that the salt cod has been soaked 24-48 hours in several changes of cold water, refrigerated, before it goes near heat. Skip this and the dish is inedibly salty, and the pinch of added salt in the sauce becomes absurd.
- Do not actually boil itSalt cod poached at a hard boil shreds and turns stringy. Bring the water barely to a shiver, slip the fish in, and hold it below a simmer for 10-15 minutes until it flakes.
- Archaic measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons. A third of an imperial pint is about 190 ml, roughly 3/4 cup. Two or three ounces of butter is 55-85 g; the higher figure gives a distinctly rich sauce.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies for a week or two. A wine or cider vinegar with a few drops of hot sauce, or a splash of pepper vinegar, stands in for it. It is there for sharpness as much as heat.
- Watch the rouxFlour worked into melted butter and then let down with boiling water is a thin white sauce; keep it moving and give it two or three minutes of actual cooking or it will taste of raw flour. Add the water gradually rather than all at once.
- Reheating the fish"Quite hot" means hot through, not cooked again. Stir gently over low heat for a few minutes only; the flakes are already cooked and will break down to threads if stirred hard.
- YieldRoughly 500 g of soaked, cooked salt cod with this quantity of sauce serves three to four with the parsnips or mashed potato piped round.
Salt cod was one of the great cheap proteins of nineteenth-century Britain, shipped dry from the North Atlantic fisheries and kept for months without ice, which is why a book like Cassell's gives it a run of recipes and quotes a price by the pound. The maître d'hôtel label properly belongs to a compound butter of parsley, lemon and seasoning, generally traced to French professional kitchens of the early 1800s and named for the household steward who oversaw the table; by the time it reached English domestic cookery it had loosened into a shorthand for almost anything served in a buttery parsley sauce. The closing line — that cold leftover salt fish may be dressed the same way — is the real logic of the entry. Cassell's was written for households where boiled fish had to reappear as a different dish, and the parsnips or mashed potato banked round the edge were there to make a modest quantity of fish fill a platter.