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Picked-up Codfish
Take two pounds of Nantucket codfish, cover it with cold water and soak over night. Then remove all bones and skin, shred into small pieces, cover with cold water, and place over the fire. As soon as it boils, pour off the water, taste of the fish, and if too salt, repeat the process. Once more drain off all the water and cover the fish with a cup and a half of rich milk, and let it cook slowly fifteen minutes. Add butter the size of a walnut, stir in quickly two eggs, remove from the fire, and serve at once.
A dish of salt cod freshened in several changes of water, then finished in milk and enriched with egg. The whole thing turns on the desalting, which the original leaves to your tongue rather than the clock.
- "Nantucket codfish" is salt codThis means hard, salt-dried cod, sold in slabs or in the old wooden boxes, not fresh fillet. Look for bacalao or bacalhau at a Latin, Italian or Portuguese grocer; two pounds of the dry, bone-in kind is what the recipe assumes, since it tells you to remove bones and skin. Fresh cod will not work here.
- The hinge: taste before the milk goes inThe soak plus one boil-and-drain is often not enough with modern heavily salted cod. Taste after each drain and repeat the cover-with-cold-water-and-bring-to-a-boil step a second or even third time. Once the milk is added you cannot correct the salt, and the finished dish should need no seasoning at all.
- Soaking, done properlyThe recipe says only "over night" in cold water. Give it a generous volume of water and change it two or three times. Modern guidance is to soak salt cod in the refrigerator rather than on the counter.
- "Rich milk"In period usage this meant unskimmed milk with the cream still on it. Use whole milk, or a cup of whole milk with a half cup of cream, to get the body the recipe expects. A cup and a half for two pounds of fish gives a thick, barely saucy mixture rather than a soup.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly an ounce, or two tablespoons. Shelled walnut, not the whole nut in its shell.
- The eggsBeat them first and add them off the direct heat, stirring constantly, then return the pan to the lowest flame for a minute or two until the mixture just thickens. "Stir in quickly, remove from the fire" risks both scrambled lumps and egg that never reaches a safe temperature. It should coat a spoon, not set.
- Fifteen minutes in milk is rightThis is one old timing that holds. The fish is cured, and by this stage it has already been boiled once or more in the desalting; the simmer is there to soften the shreds and let them absorb the milk, not to cook them through.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of dry salt cod serves four to six. It was eaten on buttered toast or with boiled potatoes and beets, and was a common breakfast dish; a little black pepper and chopped parsley are period-appropriate additions.
"Picked-up" is old New England kitchen language for fish pulled apart into shreds by hand rather than cut, and picked-up or creamed salt codfish was a breakfast staple along the coast well before this book was printed. Salt cod was the region's great export and its great pantry staple: dried on racks in the open air, it kept for months without ice, which is exactly why a cookbook of this era treats a two-pound slab as an ordinary thing to have in the house. The finish with milk, butter and egg belongs to the same family as creamed chipped beef and the fish hashes that filled American breakfast tables, all of them ways of stretching a preserved protein with dairy into something soft enough to eat on toast.