Codfish
Let the fish soak in cold water for four or five hours to draw out the salt; wash the fish very clean; put it in a kettle with cold water; bring to a boil; then stand aside where it will keep just below boiling temperature. When perfectly tender, drain; put on a platter and cover with cream sauce. rianned for a
A plain treatment of hard salt cod, the kind sold in a wooden box or as a stiff dried slab. The whole method hinges on temperature: once the water boils, the flesh tightens and shreds.
- Know which cod you haveHeavily salted, board-stiff cod needs the long soak described here, and ideally the water changed two or three times. Modern lightly salted or brine-packed fillets are far less salty and need only an hour or two, or the fish ends up bland and waterlogged.
- "Just below boiling"This is the instruction that matters. The recipe brings the water to a boil once, then has you stand the kettle aside; from that point hold it barely trembling, around 170-180F, rather than letting it boil again. Boiled salt cod goes stringy and falls into threads.
- TimingThe original gives none. Poached at that temperature, a thick piece takes roughly 15-25 minutes; it is done when it flakes under gentle pressure but still holds together.
- Taste the soaking waterRather than trusting a fixed four or five hours, taste a soaked scrap after simmering a moment. If it is still fiercely salty, soak longer; the salt content of dried cod varies enormously between producers.
- Cream sauceMrs. Fryer assumes you know it: a white roux sauce, roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to a cup of milk or cream, cooked until it coats a spoon. Season with pepper and nutmeg, and salt only after tasting, since the fish brings plenty.
- The kettleIn this period a "kettle" is any large pot, not a tea kettle. Use a wide pan that lets the pieces lie flat and stay submerged.
- YieldAllow roughly 1/4 lb of dried salt cod per person before soaking; it gains weight as it rehydrates. Serve with boiled potatoes, and a chopped hard-boiled egg stirred into the sauce is a common New England addition.
- That trailing line"rianned for a" appears to be a stray fragment of text rather than part of the method; it is not possible to tell from the page what it belonged to.
Salt cod was one of the great commodities of the Atlantic world long before it was a homely supper dish: dried and salted on Newfoundland and New England shores, it traveled without refrigeration and turned up in the kitchens of Catholic Europe, the Caribbean and the American interior alike. In a book like this one it appears not as a specialty but as pantry stock, something a household kept on hand for fast days, for Fridays, and for the stretch of late winter when fresh fish was not to be had inland. The cream sauce finish is the standard American domestic treatment of the period, and the same soak-and-poach base underlies creamed codfish on toast and codfish cakes.