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Creamed Salt Codfish
Cut a sufficient amount of fish into small pieces, cover it with cold water and let it come to a boil, and simmer until tender. Drain, and pick it into small bits, but do not mince it too fine. Make a cream sauce by rubbing together 2 tablespoonfuls of butter and 1 of flour and add to it 1 pint of milk. Boil until it thickens, and if not perfectly smooth, strain it. Put in the fish, add pepper, and let it heat thoroughly.
Or omit the flour, and after the fish is thoroughly heated in the milk and butter, stir in a well-beaten egg and remove from the fire. Stir briskly until the sauce is thick and creamy. Add a dash of paprika. Baked potatoes, and Graham or entire wheat gems or muffins, are good accompaniments, or it may be served on crisp squares of toast.
A plain New England breakfast dish that depends almost entirely on how much salt you pull out of the fish before it goes near the cream. The recipe assumes you already know that step, so it is worth stating.
- Freshen the fish firstHard, bone-dry salt cod in a wooden box needs 8 to 24 hours in several changes of cold water before boiling; taste a shred to judge. The lightly salted fillets sold vacuum-packed today need only a few hours, and the loose shredded "codfish" in jars is often ready after a rinse and a soak of 30 minutes.
- Do not boil it hardBring to a boil and drop immediately to a bare simmer, as written. A rolling boil toughens and stringifies the flesh. Ten to fifteen minutes at a simmer is usually enough for it to flake.
- Quantity"A sufficient amount" is unhelpfully vague. One pint of milk makes sauce for roughly 1/2 lb of dry salt cod, which yields about 2 cups of picked fish and serves four.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups. Two tablespoons butter to one of flour is a deliberately loose roux, so the sauce will be thin by modern standards; use 2 tablespoons flour if you want it to coat toast without running off.
- No added saltPepper and paprika only. Even well-soaked cod carries plenty of salt, and it releases more as it heats in the milk. Season at the end if at all.
- The egg versionFor the flourless variant, take the pan off the heat before the egg goes in, then stir constantly. Beaten egg in hot milk sets into curds above about 180F, and the residual heat of the pan is enough to thicken it.
- Gems"Gems" are small quick breads baked in heavy cast-iron gem pans, close to a modern muffin tin. Whole wheat muffins do the same job; Graham flour is coarse whole wheat.
Salt cod was the working currency of the North Atlantic fisheries, and a box of it kept in any pantry without ice, which is why creamed codfish on toast became a staple American breakfast long after fresh fish was available in cities. Dishes like this one, with picked fish folded into a milk sauce, appear under many names in nineteenth-century cookbooks. The suggested accompaniments here, baked potatoes and Graham or entire wheat gems, reflect a period when whole-grain breads carried a distinct air of healthful reform.