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Salt Fish, Cooked, Rechauffe Of
No. 1.--Free it from skin, and tear the flesh into flakes. Beat the remains of boiled parsnips to pulp, moisten this with cream or milk, add butter and flour to thicken, and season with pepper and mixed mustard. Add the flaked fish, and stir the preparation over the fire till it is hot. It must not boil. No. 2.--Tear the fish into flakes; mix these with double the quantity of mashed potatoes, add a slice of fresh butter and two or more hard-boiled eggs finely minced. Heat the preparation over a gentle fire, and serve with egg sauce. No. 3.--Tear the fish into flakes, and mix it with a hard-boiled egg finely minced. Make a circular wall of mashed potatoes, put the fish into the centre, and heat the whole in a brisk oven. Serve with egg sauce. No. 4.--Tear the flesh into flakes; put them into a saucepan with as much cream thickened with flour and butter as will cover them. Let them heat gently, and serve with egg sauce. No. 5.--Tear the fish into flakes, and mix with double their quantity in mashed potatoes. Moisten the preparation with cream, season with pepper and salt, and bind together with a beaten egg. Make it into small balls. Dip these in beaten egg, roll them in bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot fat. When they are brightly browned, drain them, and serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Salt fish thus prepared may be pressed into a buttered basin, and browned in the oven; after which it should be turned carefully upon a hot dish, and garnished with minced egg and minced beetroot. No. 6.--Tear the fish into flakes, and take half the quantity of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Fill a baking-dish with alternate layers of fish and bread-crumbs, season each one with pepper and dry mustard, and upon the uppermost layer (which should consist of crumbs) stick here and there little pieces of fresh butter. Pour into the dish as much cream or new milk as will moisten the preparation. Bake in a well-heated oven, and serve. Time to bake, half an hour for a moderate-sized dish.
Six ways to use up cooked salt cod, all of them assuming you already have a piece of soaked, boiled fish sitting cold in the larder. The instructions are terse because the book expects you to know that salt fish is bland, dry and salty at once, and that the job of every one of these dishes is to add fat and starch.
- Start with properly soaked fish"Salt fish, cooked" means salt-dried fish, usually cod but sometimes ling or hake, that has been soaked in several changes of water (commonly overnight to a day or more, depending on how hard-cured it is) and then poached until it flakes. If you begin with unsoaked salt fish, every one of these six dishes will be far too salty. Season at the end, not the start, and taste before adding any salt at all.
- No. 1: do not let it boilThis is the one instruction that matters. The parsnip-and-cream base is thickened with flour and butter, and once the flaked fish goes in, a boil will tighten the fish into strings and can split the cream. Keep it just below a simmer and stir until hot through, three or four minutes.
- Oven temperaturesPeriod oven terms are approximate. A "brisk oven" (No. 3) is usually taken as somewhere around 425-450F, a "well-heated oven" (No. 6) a little lower, roughly 400-425F; the half hour given for a moderate-sized dish is about right, and the crumb top should be brown and the milk bubbling at the edges.
- "Fresh butter" and "new milk"Fresh butter means unsalted, which matters here given the fish. New milk is milk as it came from the cow that day, unskimmed and unhomogenised: use whole milk, or whole milk with a spoonful of cream stirred in.
- Egg sauceCalled for three times and never explained, the book assuming it needs no explanation. Period versions vary: a melted-butter sauce, or a plain butter-and-flour sauce made with milk, with two or three chopped hard-boiled eggs folded through and a little pepper. It is a common English partner to salt fish and worth making rather than substituting.
- No. 5: frying temperatureFry the crumbed balls at 350-375F. The mixture is already cooked, so you are only setting the crust and heating the centre: two to three minutes, turning once. "Brightly browned" is the cue. The folded napkin is a period serving conceit; a rack and a warm plate do the same job better.
- Proportions and yieldThe book gives ratios rather than weights, which is the useful part: fish to double its bulk in mashed potato (Nos. 2 and 5; No. 3 gives no proportion, only a wall of potato round the fish), or fish to half its bulk in breadcrumbs (No. 6). As a rough guide, about 12 oz of cooked flaked fish with 1 1/2 lb mashed potato will feed four as a main course, or make somewhere near 16 fried balls.
- Where the mustard goesMixed mustard in No. 1 means prepared mustard from the jar; dry mustard in No. 6 is the powder, used sparingly between layers. Both are there to cut the fat and lift the fish, so do not leave them out on the grounds that mustard and fish sound odd.
Réchauffé is simply French for "reheated", and a whole chapter of Victorian and Edwardian cookery books is given to it: leftovers were often presented as a moral as well as a domestic matter, and a cook who could turn cold remains into a presentable second dish was worth her wages. Salt cod earned six variations here because it was among the cheapest protein in Britain, shipped dried from the Newfoundland and Norwegian fisheries and keeping for long periods without ice, and because the traditional way of eating it (boiled plain with egg sauce, particularly on Fridays and through Lent) almost guaranteed a surplus. Nearly every version leans on potato, breadcrumb, cream or butter, which is the whole logic of the dish: the fish supplies salt and savour, the starch and fat supply everything else. The last flourish of No. 5, a moulded shape turned out and garnished with minced egg and beetroot, shows the period habit of dressing thrift up in the visual language of a made dish.