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Creamed Salt Codfish
Pick salt codfish in pieces (there should be three-fourths cup), and soak in lukewarm water, the time depending upon hardness and saltness of the fish. Drain, and add one cup White Sauce I. Add one beaten egg just before sending to table. Garnish with slices of hard-boiled eggs. Creamed Codfish is better made with cream slightly thickened in place of White Sauce.
A two-ingredient dish that lives or dies on two things: how long the fish soaks, and whether the egg is allowed to boil. Both are underspecified in the original.
- How long to soak"The time depending upon hardness and saltness" is honest but unhelpful. Modern hard-dried salt cod wants 8 to 24 hours in cold water in the refrigerator with three or four changes; the lukewarm-water method here is a shortcut that works in an hour or two for the softer, boxed shredded cod that was also sold in this period. Taste a shred before you commit — it should be pleasantly salty, not harsh.
- Three-fourths cup of fishMeasured picked and flaked, loosely packed, before soaking, as the recipe's own wording makes clear. That is a small quantity of dry salt cod, which swells noticeably as it rehydrates.
- White Sauce IThe book's own white sauce: butter and flour cooked together, then a cup of milk, with salt and pepper. The recipe's closing line is the better instruction — use cream lightly thickened with a little flour instead, and the dish tastes of fish and cream rather than of paste.
- The egg is a liaison, not a binderThis is the hinge. Beat the egg, temper it with a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce, stir it back into the pan off the heat, and serve at once. If the sauce returns to a simmer after the egg goes in, it curdles and the whole thing turns grainy.
- Don't add saltSeason the sauce only after the fish is in it. Even well-soaked cod carries plenty of salt, and pepper plus a scrape of nutmeg is usually all it needs.
- Warming the fishThe soaked cod should be gently heated through in the sauce for a few minutes, not boiled hard. Salt cod that is cooked aggressively after soaking goes stringy and tough.
- Raw-egg noteThe egg here is barely cooked. If you are serving someone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use a pasteurized egg or leave it out — the sauce holds together perfectly well without it.
- Yield and servingEnough for two, or three at breakfast, spooned over buttered toast, split baking-powder biscuits or boiled potatoes. Hard-boiled egg was a common accompaniment to salt fish, though the recipe calls for it only as a garnish.
Salt cod was a cheap, shelf-stable staple in New England for generations and a mainstay of the region's export trade, so a Boston cookbook of the 1890s could assume most readers had a piece of it in the pantry — cured and available inland long before refrigeration made fresh fish practical. Creamed codfish on toast belongs to the family of thrifty milk-sauce breakfast dishes that includes creamed chipped beef and creamed eggs. The numbered white sauces let a cook be told "add one cup White Sauce I" and reproduce the same result twice. The dish survives regionally as codfish gravy or picked-up codfish, and cured cod with a cream or milk sauce also turns up in Newfoundland and Portugal.