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Salt Fish Souffle
Peel eight potatoes, and boil them for thirty minutes. Drain the water from them, and mash them very fine; then mix in thoroughly about a pound of finely-shredded boiled salt cod or other fish. Add two table-spoonfuls of butter, salt and pepper, and three-quarters of a breakfast-cupful of milk. Beat up two eggs, stir them into the mixture, and put it in the dish in which it is to be served. Place in the oven for ten minutes. Beat the whites of another two eggs to a stiff froth, and add a quarter of a tea-spoonful of salt; then add the yolks; spread this over the dish of fish. Return to the oven until brown, and serve at once.
A potato-and-salt-cod pudding under an egg glaze, closer to a brandade gratin than to a true soufflé. The recipe assumes you arrive with cod already soaked and boiled, which is the step that decides whether the dish is edible.
- Soak the cod firstHard salt cod needs 24-48 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, changed three or four times, before it is simmered. Skip or shorten this and the finished dish is inedibly salty; taste a scrap of the poached fish before you commit it to the potatoes.
- Hold back the saltSeason the potato mixture only after the cod is folded in, and taste; the cure level of the fish varies.
- A breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so the three-quarters called for here is about 6 to 7.5 fl oz. Add it gradually, since the amount of liquid the potatoes take depends on how floury they are.
- PotatoesEight potatoes, taken as medium, come to roughly 2 to 2.5 lb. Use a floury variety (russet, Maris Piper) and mash them dry, without cream, or the mixture will slump.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderately hot oven, 375-400F, suits both stages: ten minutes to set the base, then five to eight minutes more to colour the topping.
- The topping is a meringue, not a souffléWhites are beaten stiff and the yolks folded in afterwards, which gives a browned glaze rather than a risen batter. Fold the yolks in with a light hand and spread it the moment it is mixed, or it will weep.
- Watch the browningEgg white colours fast and then turns leathery. Pull the dish as soon as the surface is evenly gold, and take it to the table straight away — it deflates within a few minutes.
- YieldServes five or six as a main course with a green vegetable or a sharp tomato sauce, which the dish wants for contrast.
Salt cod was the everyday fish of Victorian Britain long after fresh fish reached inland towns by rail: it kept without ice, travelled cheaply from the Newfoundland and Norwegian fisheries, and was often said to be the standard Friday and Lenten dish in Catholic and High Church households alike. Pairing it with potatoes is a habit shared across the whole salt-cod world — Portuguese bacalhau dishes, Provençal brandade, New England fish hash — because the bland starch absorbs and stretches an assertive, expensive-by-weight protein. The dish closes with an egg glaze, called a soufflé here, which gives a plain economical dish a browned finish before it goes to table.