Home › Shellfish › Baked Cod with Oyster Stuffing
Baked Cod with Oyster Stuffing
Clean a four-pound cod, sprinkle with salt and pepper, brush over with lemon juice, stuff, and sew. Gash, skewer, and bake as Baked Halibut with Stuffing. Serve with Oyster Sauce. 1 cup cracker crumbs 1/4 cup melted butter ¼ teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper
Fannie Farmer wrote for cooks who owned the whole book, so this entry is largely a set of cross-references. The stuffing list is also incomplete as printed — oysters belong in it, about a cup, drained and coarsely chopped, bound with the crumbs and butter.
- The fishA four-pound cod means a whole cleaned fish; the weight as given may or may not include the head. A 3–4 lb piece of thick centre-cut cod, boned but left in one piece, works the same way. Have the backbone removed so there is a cavity to stuff.
- "Gash, skewer"Gash means cutting shallow diagonal slits along the top of the fish and pushing a thin strip of salt pork or bacon into each — cod is lean and dries out. Skewer means bending the stuffed fish into an S or ring and holding it with metal skewers so it sits high in the pan rather than flattening out.
- SewingClose the cavity with a trussing needle and cotton string, or lace it shut with toothpicks and string. Butchers' twine and a large darning needle are the modern equivalents; remove the thread before serving.
- Oven and timeThe book gives no oven temperatures; the halibut recipe it points to calls for a hot oven, which today means roughly 400–425F. A stuffed four-pound cod takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour, basting two or three times with pan fat. It is done when the thickest flesh reaches 145F and the stuffing is hot through.
- Cracker crumbsThese were common soda or water crackers, crushed fine; plain unsalted crackers are the closest match. If you use salted crackers, taste before adding the full 1½ teaspoons of salt.
- Oyster sauceThe period sauce is a white sauce made with milk and the strained oyster liquor, finished with oysters. Add the oysters at the very end and cook only until the edges just ruffle, about two minutes; longer cooking toughens them.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a four-pound cod will serve roughly four to six.
Baked stuffed cod belongs to the New England cooking that the Boston Cooking School was codifying in the 1890s, when cod was still cheap, local and the region's defining fish — the "sacred cod" hanging in the Massachusetts State House was a monument to the trade that built Boston's fortunes. Pairing it with oysters was equally regional and equally economical: oysters were an everyday food in nineteenth-century American cities, sold by the barrel and used freely in stuffings, sauces and stews rather than treated as a luxury. The terse cross-referencing style — gash, skewer, and bake as Baked Halibut — is characteristic of Farmer, who assumed her reader was working through a course of instruction rather than opening the book at random.