Fish Balls
1 cup salt codfish 2 heaping cups potatoes 1 egg 1/2 tablespoon butter 1/8 teaspoon pepper Wash fish in cold water, and pick in very small pieces, or cut, using scissors. Wash, pare, and soak potatoes, cutting in pieces of uniform size before measuring. Cook fish and potatoes in boiling water to cover until potatoes are soft. Drain Thoroughly through strainer, return to kettle in which they were cooked, mash thoroughly (being sure there are no lumps left in potato), add butter, egg well beaten, and pepper. Beat with a fork two minutes. Add salt if necessary. Take up by spoonfuls, put in frying-basket, and fry one minute in deep fat, allowing six fish balls for each frying; drain on brown paper. Reheat the fat after each frying.
A plain salt-cod-and-potato mixture fried in deep fat. Everything depends on getting the mixture dry and hot when it goes into the oil, or the balls slump and drink fat.
- Salt cod needs desaltingThe recipe's "wash in cold water" is not enough for most modern salt cod, which is heavily cured. Soak the fish in several changes of cold water for 4 to 12 hours, depending on thickness, then taste a shred before cooking; if it is still aggressively salty, keep soaking. This is probably why the recipe adds salt only "if necessary."
- What a cup of codfish isA cup of fish picked into very small pieces is roughly 3 to 5 oz by weight, depending how finely it is picked. Two heaping cups of raw cut potato is about 1 lb, or two medium russets.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, only "deep fat." Modern practice for this kind of frying is about 375F, at which one minute is about right; cooler fat gives greasy, pale balls and the mixture is more likely to break up.
- Work while hotMash, season and beat the mixture while it is still steaming hot, and fry it hot. Cold fish-ball mixture is slack and will not hold its shape in the fat.
- The basketSpoonfuls of soft mixture will fall through an empty frying basket. Lower the basket into the fat first, then drop the spoonfuls into it so they set on contact. A slotted spoon works as well.
- Six at a time, and whySix balls per batch keeps the fat from dropping too far in temperature, and the instruction to reheat the fat between batches is the whole trick. Let the oil come back up to frying heat each time.
- DrainingBrown paper was the period's absorbent; use a wire rack over a sheet pan, which keeps the undersides crisp, rather than paper that steams them.
- YieldAbout 12 to 15 balls, enough for three or four people as a breakfast or supper dish. Traditionally served with baked beans, or with a poached egg.
Salt cod and potato cakes were a common New England breakfast dish in the nineteenth century, a product of the cod fishery that supplied Boston and the coastal towns with cheap, shelf-stable protein long before refrigeration. This version reads in the Boston Cooking School style, and the instruction to measure the potato cut in uniform pieces before cooking fits that school's insistence on repeatable proportions. Fish balls were also a Friday and Lenten dish in some Catholic households, and the pairing with baked beans on Saturday night or Sunday morning is often traced to the same New England Sabbath cooking that made beans a weekend fixture.