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Codfish with Macaroni
2 ounces of macaroni; 1/2 pound of salt cod; 1/2 pint of strained tomatoes; 1 tablespoonful of butter; 1 tablespoonful of flour; 1 tablespoonful of onion juice; 1 teaspoonful of salt; 1 salt-spoonful of pepper. Break the macaroni into small pieces and boil rapidly for half an hour; drain; throw into cold water and let stand for fifteen minutes. Wash and cut the codfish into small blocks. The fish should have soaked overnight. Rub the flour and butter together, add the tomato, and let it come to a boil, stirring constantly. Now add the macaroni, fish, onion juice, salt, and pepper. Mix until boiling, stand over hot water for thirty minutes.
A late-Victorian salt cod supper built on pantry staples. Two things matter: the fish must be properly desalted before it goes anywhere near the sauce, and the macaroni does not need anything like half an hour.
- Soak the cod firstThe instruction to soak overnight is easy to miss, buried mid-recipe. Salt cod needs 12 to 24 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, with the water changed three or four times, or the finished dish will be inedibly salty. Taste a corner of the soaked fish before proceeding.
- Hold back the saltThe teaspoonful of salt assumes cod that has given up nearly all of its cure. Add none at the start, taste after the sauce and fish have come together, and season then if it needs it.
- Macaroni timingHalf an hour of rapid boiling is far longer than modern pasta needs, and probably reflects the coarser dried pasta of the period. Modern macaroni is done in 7 to 10 minutes; cook it a minute short of al dente since it will sit over hot water for another half hour. The cold-water rest afterward can be reduced to a quick rinse to stop the cooking.
- MeasuresA salt-spoonful is about 1/4 teaspoon. Half a pint of strained tomatoes is one cup, which today means passata or canned crushed tomatoes pushed through a sieve. Two ounces of dry macaroni is roughly half a cup.
- Onion juiceGrate onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a tablespoon of juice takes about one medium onion. Grated onion pulp works if you do not mind the texture.
- Stand over hot waterThis means a double boiler or a bowl set over barely simmering water, not direct heat. It is there to keep the dish hot and let the flavours settle without scorching the tomato or overcooking the fish.
- Fish textureThirty minutes over hot water is likely to break the cod into flakes. If you want distinct blocks of fish, fold them in during the last ten minutes.
- YieldHalf a pound of dried salt cod and two ounces of macaroni feeds two generously, or three as a light course.
Salt cod was the cheap, keeping protein of the nineteenth-century North Atlantic household, stacked stiff as board in the grocer's and sold by the pound long after fresh fish had spoiled. Recipes like this one belong to the moment when two other cheap staples reached the American kitchen in quantity: factory-dried macaroni and canned or bottled tomatoes, both increasingly available in the closing decades of the century.