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Codfish Balls (Cup codfish cups mashed potato)
1 cup codfish 1½ cups mashed potato Yolk of 1 egg 1 tablespoon soft butter Dash of pepper White of 1 egg Flour Wash the fish in cold water and pull in small pieces; mix with the potatoes. Beat the egg; stir to a paste with the butter; add pepper, then the whites beaten to a stiff froth. Turn in the fish and potato; mix well with a fork; flour the hands and roll the mixture into round balls. Flatten to one-half inch thickness and fry in hot fat. can salmon
A standard New England salt-cod cake, written for a kitchen where a box of dried salt cod sat in the pantry year-round. Most of the work is in the fish, not the mixing.
- The fish is salt cod"1 cup codfish" almost certainly means dried salt cod, picked into shreds. A single cold-water rinse points to the boneless shredded cod sold ready-flaked in boxes; a whole hard-dried side needs long soaking in the refrigerator with several changes of water, then a poach and a squeeze dry.
- Taste before you saltNo salt is listed because the cod supplies it. Soaked cod varies enormously — break off a piece of the rehydrated fish and taste it before mixing, and adjust only after.
- Dry potatoThe mashed potato should be dry and unseasoned, mashed with nothing added. Watery or milk-loosened potato makes a mixture that slumps in the fat and soaks up grease.
- The beaten whiteFolding in a stiffly beaten white lightens the cakes; do it last and with a fork, as directed, and stop as soon as it is incorporated. Overworking collapses the foam and you get a dense puck.
- Flour on the hands, not on the cakeThe flour listed is for shaping only. These are not breaded — a heavy flour coating turns gummy in the fat.
- FryingThe recipe says only "hot fat" and gives no temperature; shallow or deep fat in the usual 350-375F range suits cakes like these. Below that the cakes absorb grease; well above it the outside colors before the center heats through. The potato is already cooked, but cod that has only been rinsed is not, so give the cakes long enough to heat through.
- The trailing note"can salmon" appears to be shorthand that canned salmon, drained and flaked, substitutes for the cod. If you use it, the mixture needs salt.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; this quantity makes roughly eight to ten small cakes. Such cakes were commonly served at breakfast or supper with egg sauce, tomato sauce, or catsup.
Salt cod balls descend from the New England trade in dried cod that supplied both the domestic pantry and the West Indies. Because dried salt cod kept indefinitely without ice, it was a Friday and Lenten staple in Catholic households and an everyday breakfast food in Protestant New England ones — fish cakes with baked beans on Saturday night and Sunday morning is a pairing generally traced to Boston. Boned and shredded salt cod was sold ready to use, which may be why the recipe assumes nothing more than a rinse. The offhand "can salmon" at the end marks a shift underway in the same period: canned Pacific salmon had become cheap enough to displace salt cod in exactly this sort of economical, leftover-potato supper dish.