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Codfish Au Gratin
3 cups flaked cooked codfish 1 tablespoon shortening 1 tablespoon flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 cup milk 2/3 cup grated cheese 1 cup buttered bread crumbs Bone the cooked codfish and put into greased baking dish. Cover with cheese sauce made of the other ingredients, reserving bread crumbs for the top. Bake until brown and serve hot. Serves 6.
A plain white-sauce gratin from the era when salt cod and leftover boiled fish were pantry staples. The only real decisions are which codfish you use and how long it goes in the oven.
- Which codfishIn a book of this period "cooked codfish" usually means either leftover poached fresh cod or salt cod that has been soaked and simmered. If you use salt cod, soak it 12-24 hours with several changes of water, then simmer until it flakes, and omit the 1/2 teaspoon salt entirely.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the direction is simply "bake until brown." A moderate oven, around 375F for 20-25 minutes, will do it: until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs are browned. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are only heating through and colouring the top.
- ShorteningHere it simply means solid fat for the roux -- butter, lard or vegetable shortening. Butter gives the best flavour in a cheese sauce.
- The sauce is thin by designOne tablespoon each of fat and flour to a cup of milk is a light white sauce, not a thick one. It should coat a spoon, no more; with three cups of fish it will bake down and set. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk so the flour does not taste raw.
- Add the cheese off the heatStir the grated cheese in after the sauce has thickened and the pan is off the burner. Cheese boiled in a sauce turns grainy and weeps fat. Any firm cheese works; the book simply says "grated cheese," so use what you like, a cheddar being the obvious choice.
- Buttered crumbsToss 1 cup fresh soft breadcrumbs with about 2 tablespoons melted butter until evenly coated. Dry packaged crumbs absorb less butter and scorch faster -- check the top at 15 minutes if using them.
- BoningDo the boning with your fingers over a bowl rather than a fork; pin bones in cod are fine and easily missed, and this is a dish nobody chews cautiously.
- YieldSix servings as written, which assumes a starch and a vegetable alongside. A baking dish of about 1 1/2 quarts holds it at the right depth.
Codfish au gratin belongs to the long American tradition of stretching cooked or salted cod with a milk sauce -- the same family as creamed codfish, codfish balls and scalloped fish. Salt cod was one of the oldest preserved proteins in the New England pantry and remained cheap and shelf-stable well into the twentieth century, which is why it turns up so often in household menu books. The gratin treatment, meaning a browned crumb-and-cheese top, was borrowed from French practice and had been absorbed into American home cooking as a standard way to serve up leftovers respectably. Books of this sort were built to give a housekeeper a rotation of dishes that used up what the icebox already held, and a fish gratin was a reliable slot in the week.