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Salt Codfish Balls
Put the codfish in cold water and let it come to a boil; then pour off the water, cover with fresh boiling water, and simmer slowly until tender. Remove the bones and mince the fish fine. Boil potatoes and mash while hot, beating them until light and smooth, as if to be served alone. Add butter, pepper, and a little milk or cream.
Use 1 cup of minced fish to 2 cups of mashed potatoes; mix well and add enough well-beaten egg to bind, and have the mixture just moist enough to make into balls. Form into round balls two inches in diameter, and fry in a basket in deep, hot fat until a rich brown.
Serve with these steaming hot Boston brown bread, kept hot in a steamer and sliced at the last moment.
A New England breakfast standard that depends almost entirely on how much salt you pull out of the fish before you start. The rest is mashed potato technique.
- Freshen the cod firstHard-dried salt cod needs 12-24 hours in several changes of cold water in the refrigerator before the first boil described here; modern lightly salted or frozen "salt cod" needs far less. Taste a shred of the cooked fish before mixing — if it is aggressively salty, the balls cannot be rescued later.
- Never boil it hardThe initial come-to-a-boil is a scald to draw salt. The second cooking should stay at a bare simmer; a rolling boil toughens the flakes and makes the fish stringy rather than fine-minced.
- No salt in the potatoesThe recipe pointedly lists butter, pepper and milk but not salt. Season the mash only after the fish is folded in, and only if it needs it.
- Keep the mash dryUse a floury potato (russet), drain well, and dry the pieces in the hot pan for a minute before mashing. Milk or cream should be added by the spoonful — a wet mixture will slump in the fryer and drink oil.
- Egg as binder, not enrichmentOne beaten egg is usually enough for three cups of mixture. Add it a little at a time; the target is a paste that holds a two-inch ball without cracking and without sticking to wet hands.
- Fat temperatureDeep fat should be 365-375F. Cooler and the balls absorb grease and fall apart; hotter and the outside browns before the interior is heated through. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Chill before fryingNot in the original, but 30 minutes in the refrigerator firms the balls considerably and is the single best insurance against them breaking up in the basket.
- YieldOne cup of fish to two cups of potato makes roughly a dozen two-inch balls — enough for four at breakfast with the brown bread.
Salt cod was the backbone of the New England kitchen long before it was a nostalgia dish: dried on flakes along the Massachusetts and Maine coasts, shipped to the West Indies and back, and kept in the pantry through winters when fresh fish was unreliable. Codfish balls with brown bread became fixed as a Sunday-morning breakfast in nineteenth-century Boston households, generally explained by the fact that both the steamed bread and the soaked fish could be got ready on Saturday, leaving little Sabbath labor beyond heating the fat. The instruction to keep the brown bread hot in a steamer and slice it only at the last moment reflects a real problem with the loaf — a molasses-and-rye-and-cornmeal batter steamed in a mold goes gummy under a knife when cool, which is why period cookbooks often direct that it be cut with a string or thread rather than a blade.