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Fish Left-Overs: Codfish
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.
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.
Creamed Salt Codfish.
Pick salt codfish in pieces (there should be cupful) and soak in lukewarm water. Drain, and add ¼ cupful white sauce. Garnish with slices of hard-boiled eggs.
Salt Codfish (Creole style). 1 pound boneless codfish, ½ cupful rice, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 can tomatoes, 1 onion, ½ teaspoonful salt, 1 saltspoonful pepper.
Wash and soak the codfish over night. When ready to serve, put the butter and onion in a saucepan; cover and cook on the back part of FISH LEFT-OVERS the stove until the onion is soft, not brown. Drain the codfish, add it and the rice, which has been boiled for twenty minutes; pour over the tomatoes strained; cover the saucepan, and cook gently twenty minutes.
When ready to serve, add salt and pepper, push the rice aside and dish the fish first; put on top of it the rice, and pour over the sauce.-Mrs.
RORER.
Salt Fish (Nantucket style).
Freshen cod for twenty-four hours, changing water four or five times.
Place in a kettle with cold water; as soon as it boils, remove to back of range and simmer forty-five minutes.
Serve on a warm dish, with generous lumps of butter (melted by heat of fish) and boiled potatoes.
Salt-Codfish Chowder. 2 cupfuls milk, 1 cupful shredded codfish, 1½ cupfuls potato cubes, 3 ounces salt pork, 2 tablespoonfuls minced onion, 1 teaspoonful pepper, 1 tablespoonful flour, Salt, 3 Boston crackers.
Wash the fish and cut in two-inch lengths. Tear these in pieces, and, covering with cold water, soak for three or four hours. Slice the pork, and cook in the frying pan for ten minutes. Add the onion, and cook ten minutes. Now add the flour, and stir until smooth; afterwards stir in 1 gill water. Put the potatoes in a stewpan and pour the mixture in the frying pan over them. Season with pepper and teaspoonful salt. Place on the fire, and cook for ten minutes; then take out the slices of pork and add the fish, milk, and split crackers. Cook gently for half an hour, being careful to let the chowder only bubble at one side of the stewpan. At the end of the half hour, taste before serving, to be sure to have it salt enough.- MISS PARLOA.
Codfish Balls. 1 cupful salt codfish, 2½ cupfuls potato cubes, 1 tablespoonful butter, Dash pepper, 1 egg.
Cut the fish in small pieces, put in a saucepan with the raw potato, and cover with boiling water. Let them cook until the potatoes are nearly soft. Drain thoroughly and put through the meat chopper. Stir in the butter, the well-beaten egg, and pepper, beat with a fork until light Waffle Iron and Waffles on Plate. and fluffy, roll into balls. Dip in flour, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper.
Soufflé Codfish. 2 cupfuls hot mashed potatoes, 1 pound salt codfish, 2 eggs, Dash pepper.
Soak the codfish over night; in the morning, pick into thin fine flakes, drain, and dry in a towel; add to it the beaten potatoes, pepper, and yolks of eggs well beaten. Whip the mixture until light, then blend in the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Pile in a mound on a platter, and bake until delicately brown.
Codfish with Macaroni. 2 ounces macaroni, 1 cupful strained potatoes, 1 tablespoonful butter, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK teaspoonful salt, pound salt cod, 1 tablespoonful onion juice, 1 tablespoonful flour, saltspoonful pepper.
Break macaroni in two-inch lengths, put in boiling water, boil rapidly for thirty minutes, drain, throw in cold water, and blanch fifteen minutes, then cut into pieces about half an inch long. Wash the codfish, cut it into blocks. It is better to have it soaked over night. If you wish to use it in a hurry, cover with cold water, bring to boiling point, drain, throwing away the water, and cover again. Do this three times, and it will be sufficiently fresh. Rub the butter and flour together, add the tomato, stir until boiling, then add the macaroni, fish, onion juice, salt, and pepper. Mix until boiling; stand over the teakettle or in hot water for thirty minutes, and it is ready to serve. -MRS. RORER.
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.
Ten short methods for salt cod, most of them assuming a wood or coal range with hot and cool zones and a pantry stocked with boxed salt fish. A few of the quantities have been mangled by the typesetter; the notes below flag them.
- The soak is the whole recipeEverything here depends on getting the salt down to seasoning level. Hard-dried salt cod wants 24 hours in cold water with four or five changes; modern vacuum-packed or boxed shredded cod is far less salty and may need only two to six hours. Taste a scrap of the raw soaked fish before you commit it to a dish; several of these recipes hold the salt back until the end, or tell you to taste before serving, for exactly this reason.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally one with legs for standing over coals. Any heavy skillet does the work.
- "Back of the stove" and "back of the range"The cool end of a wood range, where a pan holds at a bare simmer. Read it as low heat, or the lowest setting on a gas burner with a diffuser.
- Gill and saltspoonfulA gill is half a cup. A saltspoonful is about a quarter teaspoon.
- Boston crackersLarge, thick, plain hard crackers, split and used to thicken chowder. Common crackers or plain water crackers are the nearest thing; a handful of oyster crackers will serve, though they dissolve faster.
- Missing and garbled quantitiesIn Creamed Salt Codfish the amount has dropped out — read "there should be a cupful" of picked fish to a cupful of white sauce. In Codfish with Macaroni the ingredient list says "1 cupful strained potatoes" but the method calls for tomato, and the fish and salt quantities have lost their fractions; the dish was almost certainly a cupful of strained tomato with half a pound of cod.
- Oven for the souffléNo temperature is given because the book assumes a judged oven. A mound of potato and fish piled on a platter browns well at 400F in about 20 minutes. Baked directly on a serving platter it will need a dish that can take oven heat.
- Frying temperatureFor the fritters and the fish balls, "hot fat" means 365-375F. Below that the batter drinks oil; much above it the fritters colour before the interior heats through. Fry in small batches so the fat does not crash.
- Timings worth trimmingThirty minutes of rapid boiling reduces modern macaroni to paste — cook to the package time, usually 8-10 minutes, and skip the blanching in cold water except to stop the cooking. The Nantucket-style 45-minute simmer suits a thick dried side of cod; a modern soaked fillet is done in 10-15 minutes and will shred if pushed further.
- YieldThe pound-of-fish dishes (Creole style, souffle) will serve about four; the chowder and the fish balls three to four as a supper dish. Dishes of this kind were commonly served at breakfast or on meatless days rather than as dinner centrepieces.
Salt cod was the backbone of the New England pantry long after refrigeration arrived, and this chapter treats it as a left-over precisely because a dried side of fish sat in the house indefinitely, waiting to be turned into something. The two attributed recipes come from well-known American cooking teachers of the period: Sarah Tyson Rorer of the Philadelphia Cooking School and Maria Parloa, who taught in Boston and wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal. Rorer's "Creole style" cod with rice and strained tomato is a plain dish of onion, tomato and rice, while Parloa's chowder, thickened with split crackers and built on tried-out salt pork, is the older Yankee pattern almost unchanged. The insistence on soaking overnight with repeated changes of water is a reminder that the fish these cooks bought was bone-dry and stiff as board, nothing like the damp, lightly cured fillets sold under the same name now.