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Salt-Fish Dinner
1 pound codfish 1/2 pound salt pork 2 cups skim milk 2 tablespoons fat 2 tablespoons flour Speck of salt Dash of red pepper Cut the codfish in strips; soak in lukewarm water and cook below the boiling point until tender. Cut the pork into one-fourth inch slices; cut several gashes in each piece; fry slowly until golden brown and remove, pouring off the fat. Out of two tablespoons of the fat, the flour, seasoning and milk make a cream sauce. Put the codfish on a platter with pieces of pork around it; and serve with boiled potaoes and the cream sauce.
A plain New England boiled dinner built on salt cod, salt pork and a milk gravy. The hinge is the soaking: get that wrong and no amount of sauce will rescue it.
- Soak the cod properly"Soak in lukewarm water" understates it. Hard dried salt cod needs 12 to 24 hours in cold water in the refrigerator with three or four changes; the lukewarm bath here probably assumes a less heavily dried fish than the stiff planks sold today. Taste a shred of the soaked fish before cooking — it should read as seasoned, not briny.
- Cook below boilingThis is the instruction that matters. Held at a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil, the cod stays in flakes; boiled hard it shrinks, toughens and shreds into strings. The recipe gives neither temperature nor time, so go by the fish: it is done when it flakes readily.
- Salt porkLook for the fatty slab salt pork sold near the bacon, not cured belly bacon, which is smoked and will dominate the dish. The gashes cut in each slice keep it from curling as the fat renders. Blanch it briefly in water first if it tastes aggressively salty.
- Skim milkSkim milk was what was left after the cream was taken off for butter-making; whole milk gives a richer sauce. Two cups of milk to two tablespoons each fat and flour is a thin pouring sauce, correct here since it stands in for gravy over potatoes.
- Two tablespoons of fatThe recipe lists fat in the ingredients and then tells you to take it from the rendered pork, which is the same two tablespoons counted twice. Use the pork fat; there is no need for additional shortening.
- Seasoning"Speck of salt" means a pinch, and given the cod and the pork you may want none at all — season the sauce at the end. The dash of red pepper is cayenne, not paprika or chile flakes.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; a pound of fish with half a pound of pork and boiled potatoes would stretch to about four. Peel and boil the potatoes whole and break them open on the plate so the sauce soaks in.
Salt cod was the backbone of the North Atlantic trade for centuries, and in New England it remained an everyday food long after refrigeration made fresh fish possible — cheap, shelf-stable, and traditionally the Friday and Lenten dinner in Catholic households. The pairing with salt pork and a milk gravy over potatoes is the same logic that produced chowder and "boiled dinner": two preserved proteins, a starch, and dairy to soften the salt. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf book belongs to the early twentieth-century domestic-science movement, which favored exactly this sort of measured, thrifty, teachable dish.