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To Dress Salt Cod-Fish
Take one-third of a large fish; soak it from three to four hours; next, boiling it till thoroughly done, pick the meat fine, taking out all the bones. Then add: 3 hard-boiled eggs, chopped fine. 3 to 4 Irish potatoes, boiled and mashed. Mix all well together in a stewpan, with- 1 teacup of hot water. Salt and mustard to the taste.
Boil half an hour, and add a liberal supply of butter just before serving. If preferred the salt and mustard need not be put in until during the cooking.--Mrs.A.C.
A plain salt-cod hash of the sort that turned up at Virginia breakfast tables. Two things need attention: the soak is too short for modern salt cod, and the final half-hour boil will need watching.
- Soak longer, and change the waterThree to four hours is short by modern standards; some barrel-sold fish of the period may have been softer-cured, but many nineteenth-century recipes themselves call for an overnight soak. Hard-dried salt cod today wants 24 to 36 hours in the refrigerator with the water changed three or four times; taste a shred before you commit to cooking it.
- Do not boil the fish hard"Boiling it till thoroughly done" toughens cod. Bring the water barely to a simmer, cut the heat, and let it stand 10 to 15 minutes until the flesh flakes. It is already cooked in the sense that matters; you are only rehydrating and warming it.
- Irish potatoesOrdinary white potatoes. In Southern cookbooks of this period the qualifier distinguished them from sweet potatoes, which were often simply "potatoes." Three or four medium ones is roughly a pound to a pound and a half.
- A teacupUsually reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, though period measures varied; it is not the 8-ounce measuring cup. Start with less; the mixture should be moist, not soupy.
- Salt last, if at allEven well-soaked salt cod carries a good deal of salt, and the recipe itself allows the seasoning to be held back. Season only after the mixture has cooked and you have tasted it. The mustard is most likely dry mustard powder, a teaspoon or so.
- The half-hour boilOver a wood range this may well have been a gentler heat than a modern burner gives. Half an hour at a full boil will scorch the bottom and dry the mixture. Use low heat, stir often, and stop at 15 to 20 minutes once the flavors have come together.
- Butter and quantityThe butter goes in off the heat at the end, unmelted and generous; 3 to 4 tablespoons for this amount. "One-third of a large fish" is vague, but assume about a pound of dried cod, which feeds four to six as a breakfast or supper dish.
Salt cod reached Virginia by sea, not by river: the New England fishing fleet cured cod by the ton and shipped the middling grades south and to the Caribbean, where it kept indefinitely without ice. It was among the fish most readily kept in inland Virginia households, and it appears throughout Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled from contributions by some 250 of Virginia's noted housewives, with some contributors from neighbouring states — hence the initialed attributions like "Mrs. A. C." The combination of flaked cod, mashed potato, and hard-boiled egg bound with butter belongs to a broad family of Atlantic salt-fish hashes; the same three components, differently handled, give you New England codfish balls and the Portuguese and Spanish bacalhau dishes that traveled the same trade routes. Its usefulness in a Protestant Southern kitchen was less about fast days than about the pantry: a dried side of cod hung in the storeroom needed nothing but water and time.