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Boiled Cod with Oysters
Dress and clean fish as directed, place in boiling water slightly salted, add a few white cloves and peppers, a bit of lemon peel. Cook slowly, allowing fifteen minutes to the pound. When done arrange neatly on a folded napkin, garnish with parsley and serve with oyster sauce.
A plain Edwardian court bouillon treatment for a whole fish, with one timing instruction that will destroy the cod if you follow it literally.
- Ignore the fifteen minutes per poundCod is done when the flesh turns opaque and slips from the bone, which takes roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point. A 4 lb fish held an hour in hot water becomes cotton wool. Test at 15 minutes total for a small whole fish, then every few minutes after.
- Do not actually boilThe recipe says to put the fish into boiling water and then "cook slowly" — the second half is what matters. Bring the pan to a boil, slide the fish in, and drop the heat so the surface only shivers. A rolling boil splits the skin and shreds the flakes.
- "White cloves and peppers"Whole cloves and whole white peppercorns — four or five cloves and a teaspoon of peppercorns for a large pot. White pepper was conventional in fish and cream cookery of the period, the usual explanation being that black specks looked untidy on a white sauce.
- Salting the water"Slightly salted" undersells it. Court bouillon for fish wants about 1 tablespoon of salt per quart; the fish absorbs very little in the short time it cooks, and unsalted water leaves it flat.
- Lifting the fish outNo lifting instruction is given; a kitchen of this period would generally have had a fish kettle with a perforated plate. Without one, wrap the fish loosely in cheesecloth with long ends, or lay it on a folded strip of foil, so you can lift it whole rather than in pieces.
- The oyster sauceThis means a white sauce — butter, flour, milk or some of the fish liquor — finished with shucked oysters and their liquor. Add the oysters off the heat at the very end and let them stand in the hot sauce for a minute or two until the edges just ruffle. Simmered longer they shrink and turn rubbery. Not to be confused with bottled Asian oyster sauce.
- The folded napkinA period presentation: a fresh linen napkin on the platter absorbed the water draining off the fish so the sauce was not thinned. A rack or a bed of parsley does the same job now.
- YieldFigure a 3-4 lb whole cod for four to six people, and about a pint of shucked oysters for the sauce.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, the firm that later became General Mills, and its fish chapter reflects the plain Anglo-American cooking that a flour company's audience was assumed to keep. Boiled cod with oyster sauce is one of the oldest fixtures in that tradition — it is generally thought to appear in English household books before the American ones, and in New England it is often said to have survived as the Saturday or fast-day dinner in a region where cod was both the local catch and the local currency. The pairing with oysters was a matter of cheapness rather than luxury: through the nineteenth century East Coast oyster beds were producing on a scale that put them on working tables, canned and barrelled oysters travelled inland by rail, and a cream sauce full of them was by most accounts an economical dish. That both halves of this dish now read as expensive is a fairly precise measure of what happened to the Atlantic fishery in the century since.