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Remains of Cod
Take your fish, and remove all bones and skin. Put some butter to brown in a saucepan, and when it is colored, add the cod, sprinkling in pepper and salt and a good thickening of grated breadcrumbs. Let this all heat gently by the fire and turn it into paper cases, with chopped parsley on the top. The above recipe can be followed for making fish rissoles, but, after having mixed it well, let it grow cold. Then form into balls, roll them in breadcrumbs, and throw them into boiling fat.
Take all the remains of the fish and heat them in butter. Make some mashed potatoes, and add to them some white sauce, made of flour, milk and butter. Mix this with the fish, so that it is quite moist, and do not forget salt and pepper. Place the mixture in a fireproof dish and sprinkle breadcrumbs over it. Bake for fifteen minutes, or till it is hot through, and serve as it is.
Three ways to use cooked cod left from a previous meal, run together in one paragraph. Read it as a list rather than a sequence: a buttered hash in paper cases, rissoles fried in deep fat, and a potato-topped baked dish.
- "Remains" means leftoversThe starting point is fish already cooked — poached or baked cod from the day before rather than raw fillet. Flake it and, as the opening line directs, take out all bones and skin.
- Paper casesSmall pleated parchment or paper cups set on a baking sheet. Buttered ramekins or a shallow gratin dish do the same work; paper cases will scorch under a broiler.
- "Butter to brown"Cook the butter until it smells nutty and the milk solids turn light hazel, then add the fish at once. Past that point it turns bitter fast, and the browned butter is most of the flavour here.
- Thickening of breadcrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh — roughly a quarter to a third as much crumb as fish by volume for the rissole mixture, less for the version served in cases. The mixture should hold together but still taste of fish.
- Chilling the rissolesThe instruction to let it grow cold is not optional. A warm mixture will not hold a ball and will burst in the fat; an hour in the refrigerator is better still, and an egg wash before the crumbs helps the coating stay on.
- Frying temperature"Boiling fat" for rissoles means about 350-375F. Everything inside is already cooked, so you are only crisping the crust — two to three minutes, turning once.
- The baked versionNo oven temperature is given anywhere in the recipe; fifteen minutes is the only guide, and a moderately hot oven will brown the crumbs in roughly that time. The mixture should go in already hot, since the instruction is to bake only "till it is hot through."
- White sauce quantityNone is given. For about a pound of flaked cod and a pound of mashed potato, a sauce from 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk brings it to the "quite moist" stage described.
- YieldRoughly a pound of cooked cod handled any of these ways feeds three or four as a light main course. Cod is bland when reheated; the salt, pepper and parsley need a firmer hand than the text implies.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled by Mrs. Brian Luck and published in 1915, from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had reached England after the German invasion; it was one of a number of cookery books brought out in aid of Belgian relief. That origin shows plainly in a page like this one: an entry headed simply "Remains of Cod," concerned with getting a second dinner out of yesterday's fish. Recipes for using up cooked food were a commonplace of domestic cookery books, but they carried a different weight in a wartime book sold for charity. The three treatments here — a buttered hash in paper cases, breadcrumbed rissoles, and a potato-bound baked dish — are familiar Franco-Belgian ways of handling cooked fish, and cod was a cheap and widely available North Sea fish, sold fresh, dried, and salted.