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Dropped Fish Balls
1 cup salt cod 2 cups diced potatoes 1 egg 1 teaspoon butter Few grains pepper Wash fish in cold water and flake in fine pieces. Cook fish and potatoes together in boiling water until potatoes are done. Drain and mash, add butter, pepper and beaten egg. Beat all together thoroughly. Have fat in frying kettle smoking hot, drop the mixture by spoonfuls into fat, fry a golden brown. Drain on soft paper. It is best to first dip the spoon in the fat. Serve with Tomato or Bechamel Sauce and garnish with parsley.
A New England breakfast standard, and one that depends almost entirely on how dry the potato mixture is and how hot the fat is. Both are easy to get wrong.
- The salt cod"1 cup salt cod" means dry salted fish, flaked or shredded, perhaps 4 oz or so. Salt cod sold today is often less thoroughly dried than what this book assumed; soak it in cold water for several hours, changing the water two or three times, and taste a shred before cooking. The recipe's single cold-water wash may not be enough.
- PotatoesUse a floury baking potato, not a waxy one. Two cups diced is about 2 medium potatoes, roughly twice the bulk of the flaked fish.
- The hinge: dry the mashDrain hard, then return the fish and potato to the dry hot pan for a minute to steam off moisture before mashing. A wet mixture will slump off the spoon and disintegrate in the fat, which is the usual failure of this dish.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot" is not a target to aim for with modern refined oils. Hold the fat at 375F; the balls need to set instantly, and at lower heat they absorb fat and fall apart. Fry only a few at a time so the temperature does not drop.
- Dipping the spoonThis is a real trick, not a flourish. A fat-coated spoon releases the mixture cleanly and gives the ragged surface that distinguishes a dropped fish ball from a shaped, breaded croquette.
- Draining"Soft paper" meant plain absorbent paper of the kind then to hand; paper towel or a wire rack over a tray does the same job. Serve at once, as they soften quickly.
- YieldPerhaps 12 to 16 balls, enough for 3 or 4 as a main course with sauce. Bechamel in books of this period is a white sauce, though usually made with stock as well as milk rather than being plain white sauce; a sauce is worth making, as the balls themselves are dry.
Salt cod fish balls are the domestic tail end of the Atlantic cod trade that built the ports of Massachusetts, where dried and salted fish was both an export commodity and a cheap protein in a New England pantry, available year-round and needing no ice. By the later nineteenth century fish balls were a fixture of the northeastern breakfast table, traditionally associated with Sunday and Monday mornings, and the dropped version, spooned straight into the fat, was the quicker cousin of the shaped and crumbed codfish cake. The instruction to dip the spoon in hot fat first recurs in other American cookbooks of the period.