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Baked Cod's Head
Head and portion of the shoulders of cod; 1 teaspoonful of onion juice; 1/2 pound of veal or chicken; 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley; 1 teaspoonful of salt; 1 saltspoonful of pepper.
Trim and wash the fish. Chop the veal, adding the onion juice, parsley, salt, and pepper. Fill the fish with this mixture, place in the baking-pan with half a cupful of water. Bake three-quarters of an hour, basting frequently. When the head is nearly done, baste with melted butter, and sprinkle browned bread crumbs over it. Serve with brown sauce.
A large cod head, split and stuffed with a veal forcemeat, was once a cheap centrepiece; the cheeks and the flesh behind the collar are the eating. The recipe gives no oven setting, so the temperature and the doneness of the raw meat stuffing are what need attention.
- Oven temperatureNo setting is given. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern reading; three-quarters of an hour at that heat suits a head and shoulder section, though the recipe specifies no weight, so judge by the piece in front of you.
- The stuffing is the limiting factorRaw ground veal or chicken packed into a cavity heats slowly. Cook until the centre of the forcemeat reaches 165F, checked with a probe, even if the fish itself looks done sooner. Pack it loosely rather than compressing it.
- Getting a cod headNot a supermarket item. Order it from a fishmonger and ask for the head with a good collar attached, gills removed, scaled and split so it will hold stuffing. Frozen cod heads are sold at some Asian and Scandinavian markets.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. A teaspoon of salt for the whole forcemeat is modest; season the mixture and fry a pinch of it to taste before filling the fish.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a chunk in a garlic press. A teaspoon takes roughly half a small onion.
- Basting and the crumb finishHalf a cup of water in the pan is there for basting, not braising; top it up if the pan threatens to dry and scorch. Switch to melted butter only in the last ten minutes, then add the browned crumbs, or they darken past bitter.
- Brown sauceA period brown sauce is a flour-and-butter roux cooked to hazelnut colour, moistened with brown stock and reduced. Any well-made gravy or demi-glace serves; keep it thin enough to pour.
- Yield and servingA head-and-shoulder piece will generally feed two to three, though the recipe states no yield. Serve it whole on a hot platter and lift the cheeks, throat and collar flesh out at table with a spoon, dividing the stuffing alongside.
Baked stuffed cod's head belongs to the long tradition of cooking the whole fish rather than the fillet, and to a market in which heads were priced as offcuts. English and American cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries treat the head and shoulders as a dish in its own right, sometimes boiled with oyster sauce, sometimes baked and stuffed as here; Hannah Glasse gives a version, and the dish survived into turn-of-the-century compilations like this one. The stuffing of chopped veal or chicken is a forcemeat in the older sense, a bound meat mixture used to fill and enrich. The dish faded with the rise of the boneless fillet and the loss of the household habit of eating around bones at the table.