Toasted Codfish
Cut the fish in thin strips and freshen it. Dry, put between the wires of a broiler and toast till delicately brown.
Lay on a hot platter and spread well with butter.
A one-line breakfast dish from the era when dried salt cod hung in every grocery. Everything depends on the freshening: get the salt right and the rest is three minutes over heat.
- "Freshen" means soak out the saltCover the strips in cold water and refrigerate, changing the water three or four times over 12 to 24 hours depending on how hard the fish is. Taste a shred raw before you stop; properly freshened cod should be pleasantly saline, not stinging.
- Buy the right fishLook for salt cod, bacalao or baccalà, sold as stiff planks or in wooden boxes. Modern lightly-salted or frozen "salt cod" needs far less soaking, sometimes only a couple of hours.
- Cut thin, and with the grainCut thin -- The recipe specifies only "thin strips"; a finger wide and no thicker than about a quarter inch works. Thick pieces will scorch outside before the centre warms through.
- Dry properlyBlot hard between towels and let the strips sit uncovered for a few minutes. Surface water steams instead of toasting and you lose the browning entirely.
- The broiler in questionA hinged wire broiler, held over coals and flipped by hand. Under a modern overhead broiler set high, place the strips on a rack about four inches from the element and turn once; a stovetop grill pan or a dry cast-iron skillet does the same job with better control.
- Time it in minutes, not moreOne to two minutes a side. Curing and drying have already firmed and preserved the fish rather than cooked it, so it needs only browning through. Overdone salt cod turns to fibrous string.
- The butter is the sauceSpread it on the hot fish so it melts into the flakes. A grind of black pepper and a squeeze of lemon are period-appropriate and welcome; no salt.
- YieldAbout half a pound of dried cod, which swells considerably in soaking, serves two or three as a breakfast or supper dish with potatoes, toast or a poached egg.
Dried salt cod was the great preserved protein of the North Atlantic, and in nineteenth-century American households it was pantry stock rather than a delicacy: cheap, shelf-stable for months, and a standard answer to winter. New England cookbooks are thick with ways to use it, most of them wet, creamed cod, codfish balls, cod picked up in milk gravy, so this dry-heat treatment stands out for its brevity. Toasting the freshened strips directly on the wires of a hinged broiler was a coal-range technique, quick enough for breakfast and requiring no pan to wash. That the method is given in three sentences tells you the assumption behind it: every reader already knew what freshening meant and roughly how long her particular grocer's cod would take.