Home › French Recipes › Codfish a La Benedictine
Codfish a La Benedictine
1 pound fresh codfish 4 medium-sized sweet potatoes Salt Pepper Butter Juice of 1 lemon 1 cup cream or milk Bread-crums Boil the codfish, drain it and keep it warm. Pare the sweet potatoes, cook them in salted water or steam them and let them dry, then mash and add a pinch of pepper, about two tablespoons of butter or butter substitute, the juice of half a lemon, and one cup of cream or milk. Skin the fish and remove the bones. Pound it rather fine; add a tablespoon of butter and the juice of half a lemon. Mix the hot mashed potatoes with this. Add more milk or cream, so as to make a rough dough. Grease a baking-dish, and put the dough into it. Cover the top with bread-crums and melted butter. Put small dots of butter here and there on the top and bake in the oven for twenty minutes. Serve in the dish in which it was cooked.
A gratin of poached cod folded into mashed sweet potato, closer to a French brandade than to anything on an American fish-Friday table. The original gives no oven temperature and no salt quantity, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureBake at 375-400F. The mixture goes in hot and fully cooked, so the twenty minutes is only there to set the top and brown the crumbs.
- Fresh cod, not salt codThe recipe specifies fresh codfish, which is unusual for a dish under this name. Poach it gently in barely simmering salted water or milk for 6-8 minutes per inch of thickness, until it just flakes; hard boiling shreds it and leaves it dry.
- Season as you goSalt and pepper are listed without amounts. Salt the poaching water and the potato generously, then taste the combined mixture before it goes in the dish, since neither cod nor sweet potato carries much on its own.
- Pounding the fishThe recipe asks for the fish pounded "rather fine." A mortar or the flat of a heavy knife gives that texture. A food processor turns cod to paste in a few seconds, so pulse three or four times at most if you use one.
- "Butter substitute"In 1929 this would most likely have meant margarine or a vegetable shortening. Butter is better here; the measured amounts come to about three tablespoons, plus the melted butter for the crumbs and the dots on top.
- Cream or milkA cup for four sweet potatoes is generous, and the recipe then calls for still more to loosen the mixture into a rough dough. Add the extra gradually and stop when it holds a rough shape on the spoon, or the gratin will be soupy under its crust.
- Bread-crumbsDry crumbs, not fresh soft ones, brown properly in twenty minutes. Toss them with the melted butter in a bowl first so they coat evenly rather than sitting in buttered patches.
- YieldA pound of fish and four potatoes fills a 1 1/2-quart dish and serves four as a main course with a green salad, six as a side.