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Omelet (Cup shredded codfish eggs cup)
1 cup shredded codfish 2 eggs 1 cup milk Dash of red pepper 1/2 tablespoon butter 1/2 tablespoon flour Cover the codfish with cold water; cook half an hour in a closely covered pan; strain through a colander and return to the pan. Beat the eggs, separately and then together with the milk; add the red pepper and pour over the codfish. Rub the butter and flour together; stir it into the fish and egg; cook gently until it thickens and serve at once.
This is not an omelet in the folded French sense — it is creamed salt cod bound with egg, cooked in a pan and spooned out. The hinge is salt control: everything depends on how much salt is left in the fish before the eggs go in.
- "Shredded codfish" means salt cod"Shredded codfish" here means salt cod -- In this period shredded or flaked salt cod was sold in small wooden boxes, already boneless and pulled into threads. Substitute salt cod you shred yourself, or an equal volume of packaged salt-cod flakes.
- Taste before you commitSalt cod varies a good deal in how heavily it is cured, and may be saltier than the boxed shredded product the recipe assumes. Cover with cold water, bring barely to a simmer, taste a shred, and change the water if it is still sharp. A half hour of gentle cooking is enough to soften it; hard boiling breaks it down further.
- "Beat the eggs, separately and then together"Yolks and whites beaten apart, then combined — it lightens the mixture slightly. Two eggs and a cup of milk is a loose custard, so it needs low heat throughout.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not a fresh chile. A dash is about 1/8 teaspoon; it is the only seasoning here besides the fish's own salt.
- The butter and flourRubbed together raw, this is a beurre manié — a thickener stirred in cold at the end rather than a cooked roux. Add it in small pieces so it disperses, and keep the pan below a simmer or the egg will curdle before the flour does its work.
- Doneness"Cook gently until it thickens" means the mixture coats a spoon and just holds a line, roughly the consistency of soft scrambled egg. Take it off before it looks set; residual heat will carry it further.
- Yield and servingServes two, three at a stretch. A breakfast or supper dish; toast or boiled potatoes suit it. It does not hold -- it separates on standing, which is presumably why the recipe says at once.
Salt cod was a staple protein in the American Northeast for generations -- cheap, shelf-stable, and available inland long before refrigerated fish was. By the early twentieth century the tedious part had been industrialized: manufacturers sold boneless cod already shredded into fluffy threads in a wooden box, which is what a recipe calling for "1 cup shredded codfish" assumes. Dishes of this type -- creamed codfish, codfish balls, cod hash -- were common breakfast and supper fare in New England households, and the label "omelet" was applied loosely in period cookbooks to dishes bound with beaten egg and finished in a pan.