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Scalloped Salt Codfish
1 cup salt codfish 1/4 cup rice 1 tablespoon shortening 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons crumbs Cook rice in boiling water until tender. Soak codfish over night or put in cold water and bring to boiling point. Drain. Flake fish. Make white sauce by melting fat, adding flour, stirring until blended, then adding milk. Stir until thickened. Spread rice, codfish and white sauce in layers in oiled baking dish. Cover with crumbs and bake 20 minutes in moderate oven. Any left-over fish may be used. Serves 6.
A thrift dish built on three cheap staples: salt cod, rice and a thin white sauce. The only step that decides whether it succeeds is the desalting.
- Desalting is the hingeOvernight soaking in several changes of cold water is the reliable method; the alternative given here, a single cold-water start brought to the boil, leaves modern hard-cured cod aggressively salty. Taste a flake before assembling and soak longer if it stings.
- What "1 cup salt codfish" meansMost likely a cup of dried, boneless flaked fish rather than a piece cut from a thick bone-in fillet, which would weigh and swell quite differently. Measure by volume as written and expect the fish to take up water as it soaks.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F. Twenty minutes is enough only to heat through and colour the crumbs, since everything in the dish is already cooked.
- ShorteningHere this means lard or a bought vegetable shortening rather than butter. Butter makes a better sauce, and nothing in the method depends on the original fat.
- The sauce is deliberately thinOne tablespoon each of fat and flour to a cup of milk gives a pouring sauce, which is what you want between layers. Do not salt it until the fish has been tasted.
- Rice quantityA quarter cup of raw rice cooks to something under a cup, so the layers are thin. If you want a dish that genuinely feeds six, double the rice and the sauce and use a larger baking dish.
- CrumbsTwo tablespoons of dry crumbs barely cover the surface. Toss them with a little melted fat so they brown rather than drying out pale.
Salt cod was among the cheapest proteins in the American pantry for generations, shipped inland dried and boxed long before refrigeration reached the average kitchen, and it kept indefinitely on a shelf. The construction here -- fish and starch bound with a flour-and-milk sauce and finished under crumbs -- is a standard scallop, a format applied to oysters, potatoes, corn and leftover meat alike. The closing line, "Any left-over fish may be used," marks this as household economy: a dish designed to absorb whatever was already in the kitchen and stretch it across a table.