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Baked Creamed Codfish
Clean the tail of a cod, boil it in salted water, adding a sprig of parsley. When it is cooked, drain and wipe it; then open down the back, take out the bones, and separate the meat into pieces. Place them in layers in a dish, and between the layers a little bechamel sauce thinned with cream, a small piece of butter, and a suspicion of nutmeg. Sprinkle the top with a few bread crumbs, and set in the oven to brown.
A straightforward gratin of poached fresh cod bound with a thin bechamel. The recipe assumes you know how to poach a fish and make a white sauce, so the useful detail is in the handling.
- "Codfish" here is fresh, not saltDespite the name, this calls for the tail end of a fresh cod, boiled in salted water. Salt cod would need overnight soaking and several water changes, and would make the finished dish far too salty against the cream sauce.
- The hinge: do not overcook the poachThe fish is cooked twice, once in water and once in the oven. Poach only until the flesh just parts from the bone, roughly 8-10 minutes at a bare simmer for a 1.5-2 lb tail piece, then drain well. Fish boiled hard will shed water into the sauce and go cottony under the browning.
- Oven heatFor browning a crumbed gratin that is already hot, 400-425F for 10-15 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler. The dish only needs colour, not further cooking.
- Bechamel thinned with creamMake a standard white sauce with about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of milk, then loosen it with cream to the consistency of heavy pouring cream. Too thick and the layers will not settle; too thin and it will pool.
- "A suspicion of nutmeg"Perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon, freshly grated, for the whole dish. Nutmeg with cream and white fish is traditional in French sauce-making and is meant to be undetectable as itself.
- Bones and skinOpening the fish down the back while still warm is the easy moment to lift out the spine and pin bones. Discard the skin as well; it will not crisp under a crumb topping and turns rubbery.
- CrumbsDry crumbs brown better than fresh. Toss them with a little melted butter first, or the top will scorch in patches while the rest stays pale.
- YieldA cod tail of about 2 lb with a cup of sauce fills a 1.5-quart dish and serves four as a main course with potatoes.
This is a household version of a technique that ran straight out of nineteenth-century French professional cooking: cooked fish, flaked, layered with bechamel, crumbed and glazed. Bechamel is one of the sauces codified in French kitchens and is traditionally named for Louis de Bechameil, a financier who served as maitre d'hotel in the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is traditional rather than proven and the sauce almost certainly predates him. Cod was a workhorse fish of the North Atlantic table, cheap and abundant, and the tail end was generally among the less prized cuts - the thinner part left once the thick middle had been cut into steaks or cutlets. Recipes like this one turn a bony, awkward offcut into something that could be carried to the table in its own dish, the sort of quiet economy that compendium cookbooks collected in quantity.