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Cooking of True Proteids Continued: Fish: Salt
SALT CODFISH, CREAMED 1 cup of fish, flaked 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls of flour 3/4 cup of milk 1 egg 2 tablespoonfuls of butter Let the flaked or picked fish stand in cold water several hours or over night. Let heat gradually in the water. When the fish begins to shrink, drain and turn into a sauce made of the butter, flour and milk. An egg beaten slightly and another tablespoonful of butter (one or both) may be added at the last. Do not let the mixture boil after the egg is added. Stir constantly until the egg thickens the sauce a little.
A small, tidy dish from the era when salt cod was a pantry staple rather than a specialty item. The whole thing turns on soaking and on not overheating the egg.
- Buy the right fishLook for hard, bone-dry salt cod (bacalao, or the boxed New England kind); the shrink-wrapped "lightly salted" cod now sold in some markets is a different product and needs little or no soaking. If you use it, taste before adding salt anywhere else.
- Soak, and change the waterSeveral hours to overnight is right for dry salt cod, but change the water two or three times. A single soak leaves the fish aggressively salty, since the salt drawn out simply sits in the bowl.
- "Let heat gradually in the water"Bring it up slowly to just below a simmer and hold it there. Boiling salt cod tightens the flakes into threads. The recipe gives a visual cue rather than a time — "when the fish begins to shrink" — so go by the look of the fish.
- The hinge: the eggOnce the beaten egg goes in, keep the pan below a simmer and stir without stopping. A boil scrambles it and the sauce turns grainy. Off the heat, using the pan's residual warmth, is the safest way to do it.
- Sauce proportionsThe list gives 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls of flour, 3/4 cup milk and 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, though the later "another tablespoonful of butter" leaves it unclear how much of that butter belongs in the sauce itself. The sauce is meant to stay loose, because the fish and the egg both thicken it. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before the milk goes in to lose the raw taste.
- "One or both"The original leaves the final egg and the extra tablespoon of butter optional. Butter alone, swirled in off the heat, gives gloss; the egg gives body. Both together make it nearly a custard.
- YieldOne cup of flaked fish makes about two servings, though the recipe gives no yield — over toast, split baked potatoes, or boiled rice. Pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are period-appropriate; salt is unlikely to be needed.
Salt cod was the backbone of the American Atlantic economy for three centuries, and creamed salt fish on toast was ordinary breakfast or supper food from Newfoundland down through New England well into the twentieth century — cheap, shelf-stable protein in a house without refrigeration. Its appearance here, under the heading "true proteids," reflects the domestic-science movement of the period: some cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s were organized by the chemistry of food rather than by course, and cooks were taught that protein coagulates and toughens with high heat, which is exactly the lesson embedded in "do not let the mixture boil after the egg is added."