Home › The Principles of Cookery › Salt Fish, Boiled
Salt Fish, Boiled
Soak the fish for twenty-four hours, changing the water three or four times. Brush and wash the fish well, and if it is still hard soak it in lukewarm water. If very hard and salt, thirty-six hours' soaking will be required. Put it in a saucepan, cover with plenty of cold water, and heat it very gently. Remove the scum as it rises, and keep the water simmering only till the fish is done enough. It should never be allowed to boil fully. Serve on a hot napkin with egg sauce in a tureen. The egg sauce may be prepared as follows. Boil three eggs till hard, and cut them into pieces the size of a pea. Put these into a saucepan with a quarter of a pint of good melted butter already boiling, and stir them over the fire three minutes longer. Serve immediately. Salt fish is generally supplied by the fishmongers in a condition to require very little soaking. Time to simmer the fish, half an hour to one hour, according to its thickness--the time to be calculated from the moment when it is almost boiling. Probable cost, 4d. to 10d. per pound.
This is salt cod (or salt ling, hake or pollock) treated the English way, with a butter-and-egg sauce. The instructions are sound; two things need translating and one timing needs rethinking.
- Never let it boilThe single instruction that matters. Salt-cured fish held at a full boil shreds into fibres and turns stringy; hold the water at a bare shiver, around 170-180F, with no more than the occasional bubble breaking.
- Soaking is still the whole jobTwenty-four hours in several changes of cold water, in the refrigerator, is right for hard dried salt cod. Modern "salt cod" sold wet-packed or lightly cured needs far less, as the original notes at the end; taste a slither of the raw flesh after 12 hours and stop when it is pleasantly salty rather than harsh.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian English cookery melted butter means a white sauce of butter, flour and water or milk, roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour to half a cup of liquid, simmered smooth. Actual clarified butter will not carry the chopped egg or coat the fish.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, so a generous half cup of sauce. That serves two to three; scale up for a whole fish.
- TimingHalf an hour to an hour applies to a thick whole side of hard-cured fish. Portioned fillets an inch thick are done in 10-15 minutes at a simmer, when the flakes part under gentle pressure.
- The hot napkinA folded linen cloth on the platter absorbed the water that drains from poached fish. A rack set over the warmed dish, or simply blotting the fish, does the same and looks less startling.
- Stirring the egg sauceThree minutes over the fire is to heat the hard-boiled egg through, not to cook it further. The recipe has the melted-butter sauce boiling when the egg goes in; keeping the heat gentle from that point reduces the risk of the sauce splitting.
- Yield and accompanimentsReckon 5-6 oz of soaked fish per person. Plain boiled potatoes and parsnips were common accompaniments to boiled salt fish in the period.
Boiled salt fish with egg sauce was for centuries a standard fast-day and Lenten dinner across northern Europe, and by the nineteenth century it was cheap enough to be everyday food. The trade behind it was vast. Cod caught off Newfoundland, Iceland and the Lofoten islands was split, salted and dried into a hard, board-like commodity that travelled anywhere without refrigeration, and the same fish underlies Portuguese bacalhau, Spanish bacalao, Caribbean saltfish and the Proven cal brandade. The egg sauce is the English signature, and the note that fishmongers now supply salt fish needing "very little soaking" suggests that milder commercial curing was displacing the older, harder cures.