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Codfish and Potato Omelet
Make a potato and fish mixture exactly as if for fishballs, but leave out the egg.
Try out some salt pork in a spider and in the dripping put the fish and potato to cook. When well browned fold in omelet fashion and turn out on a hot platter.
A frugal salt-cod hash dressed up as an omelet, with no eggs in it at all. Everything depends on the crust, so the pan and the fat matter more than the proportions.
- The mixture, since the book assumes you know itStandard fishball proportion of the period is roughly one part shredded, freshened salt codfish to two parts hot mashed potato, seasoned with pepper and a little butter. Here the binding egg is left out deliberately: the mixture should be soft enough to spread in the pan, not stiff enough to roll.
- Freshening the salt codHard salt cod needs soaking in several changes of cold water, refrigerated, for anywhere from 8 to 24 hours depending on how dry it is. Taste a shred before you commit; under-soaked cod will make the whole dish inedibly salty, especially with pork fat added.
- "Try out" and "spider"To try out is to render diced salt pork slowly until the fat runs and the scraps are crisp. A spider was a cast-iron frying pan, originally footed for hearth cooking; a 10-inch cast-iron skillet is the direct descendant and the right vessel here.
- SaltBetween the cod and the pork drippings there is enough salt already. Do not season the potato before tasting the finished mixture.
- The hinge: leave it aloneSpread the mixture in the hot fat, press it flat, and let it sit undisturbed over medium heat until a solid brown crust forms underneath, roughly 8 to 10 minutes. Stirring or poking it early means it will never fold, only crumble.
- FoldingLoosen the whole cake with a thin spatula before attempting the fold, then fold it over on itself and slide it out browned side up. Without egg it is fragile, so a snugly filled pan and a generous slick of fat both help.
- Fat quantityTwo to three ounces of salt pork should give enough dripping for a large skillet, though the recipe specifies no amount. If the scraps are crisp, scatter them over the top rather than leaving them in the mixture where they will steam.
- YieldAbout a pound of potato and half a pound of soaked fish fills a large skillet and serves three or four at breakfast or supper; period accompaniments for salt cod dishes vary, ketchup or a tomato sauce among them.
Salt codfish and potato is the bedrock of New England thrift cookery, and the fishball — the same mixture bound with egg and fried in deep fat — was such a fixture of the Sunday-morning table in nineteenth-century Boston that it is often said to have passed into regional humor. This version is the lazy cousin: no rolling, no kettle of fat, one pan. Calling it an omelet is a stretch even by the standards of the period, since there is no egg in it; the name refers only to the fold. Recipes like this survive in household cookbooks because dried salt cod kept well without ice and could be bought inland by the pound, which made it the cheap protein of choice long after fresh fish became available. The salt pork doing the frying is the other half of that economy — the pantry fat of an American kitchen before commercial shortening was common.