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Boiled Cod-Fish
Boil over a slow fire and skin frequently. Season with salt. Garnish with parsley and rings of hard boiled eggs, and serve with butter and egg-sauce.
A characteristically bare nineteenth-century instruction that assumes the cook already knows how to poach a large fish. The gaps are worth filling in.
- "Skin frequently" means skimThis is almost certainly a compositor's slip for skim — lift off the grey albumin foam that rises as the fish heats. Skinning a cod repeatedly during cooking would destroy it.
- Fresh cod, not salt codThe direction to season with salt suggests fresh fish rather than salted; salt cod would need 24-48 hours of soaking with several changes of water before it saw the pot. If you are working from a dried salt fillet, this recipe does not apply.
- Slow fire means a bare simmerThe water should shiver at around 175-180F and never break into a rolling boil, which shreds the flakes and toughens the surface. Start the fish in cold or barely warm salted water so it heats evenly.
- TimingReckon roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point; a 3-4 lb piece will take about 20-25 minutes, longer if it is more than two inches through. The flakes just separate and the flesh at the bone loses its translucence at around 130-140F, though current food-safety guidance for fish is 145F.
- Salting the waterThe recipe's 'Season with salt' is unspecific; about 1 tablespoon of salt per quart of poaching water is a reasonable modern reading. A splash of vinegar to firm the flesh appears in some period fish directions and is optional.
- Egg sauceA butter-and-flour white sauce (roughly 2 tablespoons each to a cup of milk) with two hard-boiled eggs chopped in, seasoned with salt and a little cayenne or nutmeg. The book's "butter and egg-sauce" may indicate drawn butter served alongside as well, or simply the butter in the sauce itself.
- Getting it out wholePoach the fish wrapped in cheesecloth or on a rack, or it will fall apart when lifted. A wide sauté pan or roasting pan across two burners works better than a stockpot.
- YieldA 3-4 lb whole cod or thick centre cut serves six as a main course.
Boiled fish served whole under a blanket of egg sauce was a familiar dish on Anglo-American tables through the nineteenth century, and this entry can be read as a Virginia version of the English cod-and-egg-sauce of the period. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, gives instructions that stop short of any weights, times, or pot size — a terseness that suggests cooks who had learned at the stove rather than from books. Cod itself was not a Chesapeake fish but a Northern one, reaching inland Southern kitchens salted and dried, or, by the 1870s, packed in ice by rail; its appearance in a Virginia collection is a small marker of how quickly the postwar rail network changed what a household could put on the table. The garnish of parsley and sliced hard-boiled egg was common with boiled fish and white sauces of the era, valued for the plain contrast of green and yellow against a pale dish.</p>