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Codfish Balls (Cup shredded codfish pint)
1 cup shredded codfish 1 pint potatoes 1/4 saltspoon pepper 2 teaspoons butter 1 egg Pare the potatoes; cut them into cubes and put them in the kettle with the codfish. Cover with boiling water; place in the cooker for three hours. Drain; mash and beat until very light. Add the butter, egg well beaten and the pepper; also more salt if needed. Drop by tablespoons in hot fat and fry a golden brown.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the pot is brought to a boil on the range, then shut into an insulated box to finish on retained heat. Everything here works on a stovetop in a fraction of the time.
- Shredded codfishThis is salt cod, sold in the period already flaked in wooden boxes. Modern salt cod usually comes as stiff whole fillets and is far saltier than the boxed shreds; soak it in several changes of cold water for 12-24 hours, then flake, before it goes anywhere near the potatoes.
- A pint of potatoesPotatoes are measured by volume here, not weight. A pint of cubes is about 2 cups, roughly 12 oz of peeled potato, or two medium russets.
- A saltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so a quarter of one is a bare pinch of pepper. Season to taste instead of measuring it.
- Skip the cookerThree hours in the insulated box replaces about 15-20 minutes of simmering. Cubed potatoes and flaked cod are done when the potato yields to a fork; longer only waterlogs them.
- If you do use retained heatA fireless cooker is only safe when the contents go into the box at a full rolling boil in a well-filled, tightly closed vessel. A slack boil, a half-empty kettle or a leaky lid leaves fish sitting in warm water for hours. Period cooker manuals generally did warn about the full boil, but this bare loose-leaf page carries no such instruction.
- Dry the mashDrain thoroughly and return the pan to low heat for a minute to steam off water before mashing. Wet potato makes balls that slump and spit in the fat.
- FryingDeep fat at 375F, three or four balls at a time so the temperature holds. They take about two minutes and should be turned once if they are not fully submerged.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; expect roughly eighteen to two dozen tablespoon-sized balls, enough for four at breakfast.
Salt cod and potato was one of the cheapest hot breakfasts in nineteenth-century America, and fish balls appear in New England cookbooks long before they reached loose-leaf collections like this one. What dates the page is the section it sits in: fireless cookery had a vogue in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when insulated cookers, either bought or homemade from a box packed with hay or excelsior, promised a hot dinner without burning coal or gas all afternoon. Recipes were rewritten around them, which is why a dish that needs a quarter hour on the range is here given three hours in a box. Boxed shredded codfish, the ingredient the recipe assumes, was a grocery staple of the same era and has largely disappeared from shelves since.