Home › Fish › Codfish with Vegetables
Codfish with Vegetables
Freshen codfish and cut it in chops about three by six inches in size. Put into hot water and set on the stove where it will barely simmer. Boiling hardens the fiber of fish as it does of meat. When the fish is perfectly tender, drain, pour over it a butter sauce and serve for dinner with mashed potatoes, beet pickles and boiled carrots.
This is salt cod, not fresh fish, and nearly everything that can go wrong happens before the pan goes on the heat. The soaking and the refusal to boil are the whole recipe.
- "Freshen" means soakCover the dried salt cod with cold water and refrigerate 24 to 48 hours, changing the water three or four times. Taste a shred of the thickest part before cooking; if it is still aggressively salty, keep soaking. Thin fillets may need only 12 hours.
- Barely simmer, and mean itHold the water at 160-180F, with only occasional wisps of movement. A rolling boil squeezes the protein and turns rehydrated cod stringy and dry, which is exactly what the original is warning against.
- TimingDepending on thickness, tender means roughly 10 to 20 minutes at that temperature. The fish is done when it flakes cleanly under gentle pressure; it will not flake at all while still tough from insufficient soaking.
- "Chops" three by six inchesWhole salt cod sides were sold stiff as board and hard to cut in that state. Modern boneless salt cod loins come in pieces already about this size; cut them into portions after soaking, when the flesh is pliable.
- Butter sauceIn this period that means a drawn-butter or white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, thinned with a cup of milk or some of the cooking water. Do not salt it until you have tasted the fish.
- Salt elsewhere in the mealMashed potatoes and boiled carrots want their salt as usual, but hold back if the cod is on the salty side. The beet pickles are there for acid against the richness of the butter.
- YieldReckon 4 to 6 oz of soaked fish per person; a pound of dried salt cod gains weight as it rehydrates and will feed roughly four, served with the potatoes and vegetables.
Salt cod was the default fish of the inland American household long after refrigeration reached the cities, because it kept for months in a dry store and traveled by rail and wagon without ice. The Grand Banks trade sent enormous quantities of split, salted, sun-dried cod through New England ports, and "freshening" a board-stiff side in a pan of water on the back of the range was routine domestic work. The instruction here about boiling hardening the fiber is characteristic of turn-of-the-century domestic-science writing, which took pride in explaining the reason behind a rule rather than simply stating it. The suggested accompaniments — mashed potatoes, boiled carrots, beet pickles — are a plain Northern dinner plate of the era, with the pickle doing the work that a squeeze of lemon or a sharp sauce might do now.