Cod Sounds
Should be soaked in salt and water, and thoroughly washed before dressing them. They are considered a great delicacy, and may either be broiled, fried, or boiled; if they are boiled, mix a little milk with the water.
COFFEE, NUTRITIOUS.
Cod Sounds en Poule. INGREDIENTS. -For forcemeat, 12 chopped oysters, 3 chopped anchovies, 1/4 lb. of bread-crumbs, 1 oz. of butter, 2 eggs, seasoning of salt. pepper, nutmeg and mace to taste; 4 cod sounds. AVERAGE COST, 3s.
Make the forcemeat by mixing the ingredients well together. Wash the sounds, and boil them in milk and water for 1/2 an hour; take them out, and let them cool.
Cover each with a layer of forcemeat, roll them up in a nice form, and skewer them.
Rub over with lard, dredge with flour, and cook them gently before the fire in a Dutch oven.
TIME.-1 hour.
Cod sounds are the swim bladders of the cod, sold salted in the nineteenth century and now almost impossible to find outside Newfoundland, Iceland and some Chinese and Caribbean fishmongers. The recipe assumes you have them cured and stiff, which is why the soaking and the first boiling matter more than anything else here.
- What a sound isNot the head or the roe but the gas bladder, a long white gelatinous strip. Salted and dried, it keeps for a long time; fresh, it is bland and faintly sweet and turns to soft gelatine when cooked.
- Soaking is the hingeSalted sounds need a long soak in several changes of cold water, and the dark inner membrane must be rubbed off before cooking or the finished dish tastes bitter and smells strongly of fish glue.
- The first boilingHalf an hour in milk and water is a starting point, not a rule: the sounds should be pliable enough to roll without cracking before they are wrapped in forcemeat. Fresh sounds may need only fifteen minutes, heavily salted ones considerably longer.
- The forcemeat quantityA pound of breadcrumbs against an ounce of butter, two eggs and a dozen oysters gives a stiff, dry mixture that will not bind for rolling. A quarter-pound is nearer the working proportion for four sounds; add crumbs to the wet ingredients until the mass just holds together.
- Anchovies and maceSalt anchovies, rinsed and boned, or good anchovy fillets in oil. Mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet; a large pinch of ground mace is enough alongside the nutmeg, and both were doing the work salt and pepper alone could not.
- The Dutch ovenHere this means a tin reflector oven standing open before an active fire, not a lidded pot. A moderate oven on a rack over a tray is the nearest modern substitute for the dry, radiant heat; the hour given is for the reflector and modern baking may be quicker, so check that the forcemeat is set and lightly browned.
- Lard and dredgingRubbing with lard and dusting with flour is the period method for getting a crust on something wet. Butter behaves similarly but browns faster and darker.
- Yield and costFour rolled sounds serve four as a savoury course or two as a main dish.
Cod sounds reached British kitchens as an offshoot of the Newfoundland and Norwegian salt cod trade: the bladders were saved, salted in barrels and shipped as a cheap by-product, and by the eighteenth century they appear in English cookery books boiled, fried, or served in a rich sauce. Their appeal was texture rather than flavour, a gelatinous, almost marrow-like softness that cooks prized in the same way they prized calf's foot, palates and lambs' ears. "En poule" is not standard French and its sense here is uncertain, quite possibly a corruption in the printed title; the oyster-and-anchovy forcemeat, however, is the standard Victorian fish stuffing, oysters being still cheap enough to chop by the dozen. As fashion turned against offal and gelatinous cuts, sounds vanished from British shops, surviving mainly in Newfoundland cooking, where they are fried with pork fat.