Home › Fish › Codfish in Cream Sauce
Codfish in Cream Sauce
1/2 pound of codfish; 1 pint of milk; yolk of 1 egg; 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; 2 tablespoonfuls of flour; 1 saltspoonful of salt; 1 saltspoonful of pepper.
Soak the cod overnight in cold water. In the morning pick it apart and place it in a kettle of boiling water; bring to the boiling point and drain. Place in boiling water again, and let it cook slowly about ten minutes. Drain. Cook the flour and butter together until smooth, add the milk, and when it begins to boil add the codfish, salt, and pepper. Place over hot water for twenty minutes, then add the yolk of the egg and serve immediately. Serve in a border of mashed potatoes, or with plain boiled potatoes.
A plain salt-cod creamed dish of the sort that fed New England breakfasts for two centuries. Two details decide whether it works: how hard you chase the salt out of the fish, and how gently you handle the egg yolk at the end.
- The fish is salt cod"Codfish" here means hard salt-dried cod, not fresh fillet. Half a pound is dry weight; it will roughly double once soaked. Boxed shredded salt cod and modern lightly-cured fillets are much less salty than the old bone-in planks, so taste the soaking water before deciding how long to go.
- Soaking and the double blanchThe recipe asks only for an overnight soak in cold water; changing that water two or three times is common practice and does no harm. Then come the two changes of boiling water in the recipe. The blanching is a salt-extraction step as much as a cooking one. If your fish is already mild, one ten-minute simmer is enough; a second will leave it woolly.
- A saltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. Add the salt only at the very end, after tasting, since the cod may carry all the seasoning the dish needs.
- The sauce proportionTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to a pint of milk gives a fairly thin béchamel that will thicken further as the fish sits in it. Cook the roux a minute or two without colouring, then add the milk gradually to keep it smooth.
- "Place over hot water"A double boiler, or a bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water. Twenty minutes there is for flavour and texture, not for cooking anything through, and the low heat keeps the milk from catching or breaking.
- The egg yolkThis is the hinge. Slacken the yolk with a spoonful of the hot sauce first, stir it back in off direct heat, and serve at once. If the sauce boils after the yolk goes in, it will curdle into grains.
- YieldNo yield is given; half a pound of dry cod with a pint of sauce will stretch to three or four plates depending on the potato. It does not reheat well once the yolk is in.