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Salt Codfish in Cream Saucc
Pick enough salt codfish into bits to make one cup. Let stand in cold water about half an hour.
Make one cup of cream sauce, using one tablespoonful and a half of flour, two tablespoonfuls of butter and one cup of cream; remove all the water from the fish by wringing in a cheese-cloth, add the fish to the sauce, and, when heated, stir in a lightly beaten egg. Serve upon rounds of toast, with olives, or plain lettuce, or tomato salad.
Réchauffé of Fish INGREDIENTS.
1 cup of cooked fish, flaked.
1 cup of macaroni, cooked, and still hot. ¼ a cup of butter.
1 cup of tomato purée. ½ a teaspoonful of salt.
Dash of pepper. 8 drops of tobasco sauce.
Method. - Melt the butter in the blazer and toss about in it the macaroni and fish; add the seasonings and the tomato purée, which should be well reduced. Serve when thoroughly heated.
A chafing-dish supper dish built on two things: properly desalted cod and a cream sauce that is never allowed to boil once the egg goes in.
- The hinge: the eggOnce the beaten egg is stirred in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or it will curdle into scrambled threads. Pull the blazer off the flame, stir the egg in off the heat, then return it briefly just to thicken.
- Half an hour is not enoughModern salt cod is usually heavily cured and needs several hours to overnight in cold water, changed two or three times. Taste a shred before you commit it to the sauce; if it is aggressively salty, keep soaking. Lightly salted or "boneless salt cod" in a wooden box may indeed need only a short freshening.
- Wringing the fishThe cheesecloth wring is there so the sauce is not thinned by soaking water. Squeeze firmly but do not shred the flakes to paste.
- The blazerThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the spirit lamp. Any wide, heavy skillet or saucepan works; if you use the water-bath pan beneath, the sauce will be slower but far less likely to break.
- Cream sauce proportionsA tablespoon and a half of flour to two tablespoons butter and one cup cream gives a fairly loose sauce, which is what you want since the fish will absorb some of it. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before adding cream, or it will taste raw.
- SeasoningAdd no salt until the finished dish is tasted. Pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of lemon juice all suit it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One cup of picked fish in one cup of sauce would serve about two as a light supper, or three on small toast rounds.
Salt cod was the everyday protein of the American Northeast long before it was a delicacy, arriving in kitchens as a stiff, board-like slab that had to be picked apart by hand and freshened in water. Creamed and served on toast, it was common breakfast fare in New England households, and in Catholic homes it was often said to serve as Friday fare as well; the chafing dish simply moved it from the kitchen range to the supper table. Books of this period gave the chafing dish a whole chapter, its appeal often attributed to the way it let a hostess cook in front of guests without servants, and creamed dishes on toast rounds — codfish, oysters, chicken, lobster — were its staple repertoire, quick to assemble over a spirit lamp and forgiving of a small flame.