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Codfish Fritters
Cut the codfish into strips about the size of a finger, freshen by soaking over night in cold water, in the morning dry between towels. Dip each piece in fritter batter and fry delicately brown in hot fat.
This is salt cod, not fresh fillet — the overnight soak is the whole point, and the recipe assumes you already know what "fritter batter" means.
- The fish"Codfish" in a period fish chapter of this kind means hard salt-dried cod, sold in a box or as a stiff plank. Modern salt cod is usually a lighter cure, so taste a shred after soaking; if it is still aggressively salty, change the water and give it a few more hours.
- Soaking is the hingeChange the water two or three times over the night and use a generous volume — a small bowl of water saturates and stops drawing salt out. Under-soaked cod cannot be rescued once it is inside a batter coating.
- Dry it properly"Dry between towels" is not fussiness. Wet fish sheds its batter in the fat and makes it spit; press the strips firmly and leave them uncovered on a rack for a few minutes before dipping.
- Fritter batterThe recipe assumes a batter given elsewhere and does not specify one. A plain flour-and-egg batter of the period type will serve; go easy on or omit added salt, since the fish carries its own. Mix it just before frying so it stays light.
- Fat temperatureThe book says only "hot fat." The usual period gauge is a cube of bread browning in about a minute, which is in the neighbourhood of 365-375F. Cooler than that and the batter drinks fat; hotter and the coating colours before the fish heats through.
- Cooking timeFinger-sized strips will take only a few minutes, enough to brown the batter as the recipe directs. Salt cod is cured rather than cooked, but strips this thin cook through in the time the batter needs to set.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity; cut as much soaked cod as you need into finger-sized strips. Serve them straight from the fat, with lemon or an egg or tomato sauce, both common accompaniments to salt fish; they lose their crispness quickly on standing.
Salt cod ran through the American kitchen for generations before refrigeration made fresh fish ordinary, and a household book of the Good Housekeeping era treated a box of it as a pantry staple rather than a specialty — cheap, shelf-stable, and the basis of chowders, hashes, creamed dishes and fritters through the winter. The New England trade in dried cod for the West Indies is often said to be why so many cookbooks of the period assume the reader keeps some on hand, and it is the same fish behind the Caribbean and Iberian fritters that survive today as bacalaítos and bolinhos de bacalhau. The extreme brevity of the instructions here may itself be informative: the author seems to have seen no need to say what fritter batter was, or how salt fish behaved.