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Codfish Balls (11 Balls)
1/2 cup codfish 1 3/4 cups potatoes 1 1/2 tablespoons fat Flour fat for frying Wash fish and cut into small pieces. Wash potatoes, pare and cut into slices. Cook fish and potatoes together in boiling water until potatoes are soft. Drain, and mash thoroughly. Add fat and season, if salt is needed. Shape into balls, roll these in flour and fry in deep fat. Have fat so hot that it is beginning to smoke. Drain cooked fish balls on unglazed paper.
A plain salt-cod and potato cake of the New England breakfast type, scaled here to a single small portion. Everything hinges on the mash being dry.
- The fish is salt cod"Codfish" in a recipe of this vintage means dried salt cod, sold shredded in boxes or as stiff planks. Fresh cod will not behave the same way, since it carries far more water and no seasoning of its own.
- Soak before you startSome boxed shredded salt cod is mild enough to go into the pot after a rinse, but a heavy salted plank should be soaked several hours in cold water, changed two or three times, before cooking. The recipe as written directs only that the fish be washed; the instruction to season "if salt is needed" assumes you have tasted the fish and know which you have.
- Half a cup of fishThat is a loose volume measure of picked-over shredded dry fish, perhaps in the region of 2 oz. Weighing is more reliable than filling a cup with shreds.
- Dry the mashDrain the fish and potato well and let the pan sit over low heat for a minute to steam off moisture before mashing. There is no egg here, so a wet mash will slump in the fryer and shed into the fat.
- "Fat" means lard or shorteningFor the 1 1/2 tablespoons worked into the mash, lard, shortening or butter all work. For the frying fat, use a neutral oil with a high smoke point rather than following the instruction literally.
- Fat temperatureDo not wait for smoke. Bring the frying fat to 365-375F; smoking fat is past its useful point and will darken the flour coating before the centre is hot.
- Unglazed paperBrown paper or newsprint was the standard drain. Use paper towels or a wire rack set over a tray.
- YieldEleven balls as written, each about the size of a walnut; from 1 3/4 cups of potato plus the fish that is more than a single portion. The proportions scale up by multiples.
Salt cod balls were a fixture of New England breakfasts through the nineteenth century, the household use for a fish that had been dried and barrelled for the transatlantic and Caribbean trades and kept well in a dry pantry. The dish recurs in cookbooks as "codfish balls" or "codfish cakes", usually with a preponderance of potato over reconstituted fish and bound by the potato starch alone. The stated yield in the title points to a source that counted portions, though nothing on the page itself identifies the book or the diet it belonged to.