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Boiled Fresh Codfish
Lay a square, "chunky" piece of fish in salt and water for an hour. Sew it up in a well fitted white mosquito netting, put in a kettle with enough boiling water to cover it well, add 4 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, and cook steadily, allowing ten minutes to the pound. Unwrap the fish and pour over it egg sauce.
A plain nineteenth-century method for poaching a thick cut of cod, relying on a cloth wrapper to keep the flakes from falling apart. The wrapping is worth keeping; the cooking time is not.
- The hinge: keep the water below a boil"Cook steadily" in a kettle of boiling water will shred cod. Bring the pot to a boil, slide in the fish, then drop the heat so the surface barely shivers at around 180F.
- Mosquito nettingUntreated cotton netting turns up in period cookbooks as a wrapper for fish; puddings were more often tied in a floured cloth. Use a double layer of cheesecloth, leaving long ends to lift by, or set the fish on a plate in a steamer insert.
- Ten minutes to the poundThis came from an era of large whole fish and produces dry, cottony cod on a modern fillet or steak. Judge by thickness instead: roughly 8 to 10 minutes per inch. Cooks aiming for a moister result pull the fish at 130-135F, though carryover out of a poaching liquid is slight and 145F is the usual recommended finished temperature.
- The hour in salt and waterThis works as a brine, firming the flesh and seasoning it. A common modern strength is about 1/4 cup salt to a quart of cold water; rinse and pat dry before wrapping. Half an hour is likely enough for a piece under two inches thick.
- The vinegarFour tablespoonfuls in a large kettle acidulates the water slightly; the effect claimed for it at the time was keeping the flesh white and firm. Plain distilled or cider vinegar; do not increase it.
- "Chunky" pieceThe recipe wants a thick center-cut loin or a cross-cut steak on the bone, not a thin tail fillet. Thin pieces will overcook before the wrapper has done any good.
- Egg saucePeriod versions are either a drawn-butter sauce or a milk white sauce -- 2 tablespoons each butter and flour, a cup of milk -- with two chopped hard-boiled eggs stirred in at the end, seasoned with salt, pepper and often a little lemon or a spoonful of the cooking liquid.
- YieldFigure 6 to 8 ounces of raw fish per person; a 2 lb chunk serves four with sauce and a boiled potato.
Boiled cod with egg sauce was one of the fixed points of Anglo-American cooking, so ordinary that books like this one give it in four lines and assume everyone knows what egg sauce is. New England's dependence on cod ran from the colonial salt-fish trade straight into the nineteenth-century fresh market, and a chunk of fresh cod was a cheap, respectable dinner, and a natural choice for Friday and Lenten tables in Catholic households. The cloth wrapper is the interesting survival: before wire poaching racks and fish kettles with lift-out trays were common in home kitchens, cooks sewed large pieces into netting or tied them in a floured cloth so the fish could be lowered in and hauled out whole. Vinegar in the poaching water is an equally old habit, generally explained at the time as keeping the flesh white and firm.