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Salt Fish for Lunch
Pick up one cup of cod fish quite fine; soak in warm water, mix two cups of mashed potatoes, 1 cup sweet milk, 2 eggs, butter size of an egg, and pepper. Squeeze fish from water. Mix all together thoroughly and bake in a buttered dish 20 minutes to one-half hour.
— Mrs. Clifford Bryant
A salt cod and potato bake of the plainest sort, and it depends almost entirely on how you handle the fish. The original assumes a cook who knows what salt cod tastes like at every stage.
- Soak longer than it saysThe recipe gives no soaking time, and a warm-water dip will not desalt a modern boneless plank of salt cod. Soak it in cold water in the refrigerator for 12 to 24 hours, changing the water three or four times, and taste a shred before you commit. This is the hinge of the dish: undersoaked fish makes it inedible, oversoaked fish makes it bland.
- "Pick up quite fine"Shred the fish by hand into fine flakes rather than chopping it, so you can feel for pin bones and skin as you go. Note that the recipe measures its cup of fish before the soak, not after.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it and stir it in so it disperses through the potato rather than sitting in pockets.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk. The term distinguished it from sour milk or buttermilk, which were often called for separately in baking.
- No added saltThe recipe calls for pepper only, presumably because the cured fish carries the salt. Season at the end if the soaked fish has come out mild, not before.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 375F, uncovered, which will brown the top in the 20 to 30 minutes specified. A shallow, wide dish gives more crust; a deep one will need the longer time.
- ConsistencyWith a cup of milk to two cups of mashed potato this is a loose, spoonable mixture, closer to a soufflé base than a fish cake. If your mashed potato was made with milk and butter already, hold back some of the cup of milk.
- YieldServes four as a light lunch dish. It is good with a sharp accompaniment — pickles, mustard, or stewed tomatoes.
Salt cod was the cheap protein of the American pantry well into the twentieth century: shelf-stable, sold in wooden boxes or stiff planks, and a fixture of inland households far from any coast. Dishes like this one turn on stretching two cups of leftover mashed potato and a cup of preserved fish into a meal for the family. The genre is broad — salt fish balls, creamed codfish on toast, cod hash — and a binder of egg, milk and potato is one common approach within it. The Philathea societies themselves were Protestant Bible-class organizations for young women, which is why the book reads as household economy rather than devotional cooking.