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Cod Tongues, Fried
Have 2 dozen cod tongues washed; dip each separately in cold milk, then roll in flour.
Heat a teacupful of butter in a frying-pan, lay in the tongues without their touching each other, and cook three minutes; turn, and cook on the other side for three minutes more. Serve with a gill of tomato sauce in a sauce-boat.
A short, plain fry that depends entirely on the freshness of the tongues and on not crowding the pan. Two dozen serves three or four as a first course.
- What a cod tongue isNot a tongue at all but the fleshy triangular muscle from under the jaw of the cod, cut out with the throat. Sold fresh or frozen in Newfoundland and Atlantic Canada, and occasionally at good fishmongers elsewhere; ask for cod tongues or cod cheeks, which behave much the same way.
- Teacupful of butterAn imprecise measure — anywhere from a gill (1/2 cup) to about 3/4 cup. Half a cup in a wide skillet is ample; the tongues should sit in fat, not swim.
- A gill of tomato sauceHalf a cup, warmed and passed separately. Period tomato sauce here means a thin cooked tomato purée, not a Neapolitan pasta sauce.
- Butter alone will brownSix minutes of frying at the heat needed to colour flour will darken whole butter. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds up without changing the flavour.
- Milk and flour, in that orderThe cold milk is what makes the flour cling; skip it and the coating slides off in the pan. Flour just before frying, or the crust turns pasty.
- Three minutes a side is rightUnusually, this timing needs no correction — the tongues are small and gelatinous, and they are done when the coating is golden and the centre has gone from translucent to opaque. Longer and the gelatin tightens into rubber.
- Don't crowd the panThe instruction not to let them touch is the hinge of the recipe. Tongues release a good deal of water; packed together they steam and the crust never forms. Fry in two or three batches and hold the first in a low oven.
- Salt and pepperThe original calls for neither. Season the flour, since the fish itself is very mild.
Cod tongues are a thrift dish turned delicacy: when cod was split and salted in Newfoundland's shore fishery and on the Grand Banks, the tongues, cheeks and sounds were the parts that stayed home rather than going to market. Fried in pork fat with scrunchions, they remain a Newfoundland standard, and this more genteel treatment — cold milk, flour, a teacup of butter, tomato sauce in a sauce-boat — shows the trimmings of the salt-cod trade appearing as a novelty course.