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Fish Balls
1 cup salt codfish 2 heaping cups potatoes 1 egg ½ tablespoon butter 1/8 teaspoon pepper Wash fish in cold water, and pick in very small pieces, or cut, using scissors. Wash, pare, and soak potatoes, cutting in pieces of uniform size before measuring. Cook fish and potatoes in boiling water to cover until potatoes are soft. Drain thoroughly through strainer, return to kettle in which they were cooked, mash thoroughly (being sure there are no lumps left in potato), add butter, egg well beaten, and pepper. Beat with a fork two minutes. Add salt if necessary. Take up by spoonfuls, put in frying-basket, and fry one minute in deep fat, allowing six fish balls for each frying; drain on brown paper. Reheat the fat after each frying.
A New England breakfast standard that depends almost entirely on two things: how salty the cod is when it goes into the pot, and how hot the fat is when the balls go in.
- Soak the cod firstModern salt cod is often more lightly cured than the hard, board-dry fish this recipe appears to assume, but it is usually still too salty to use unsoaked; soak it 12-24 hours in the refrigerator, changing the water three or four times, then taste a shred before you commit. The note to "add salt if necessary" is genuine, not a formality.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; for an already-cooked mixture like this, hot fat of roughly 375F is the usual modern equivalent. One minute is enough at that heat for a spoon-sized ball, since everything in the mixture is already cooked and you are only setting a crust. Frying only six at a time and reheating the fat between batches serve the same end: a drop in the fat's temperature gives greasy, collapsing balls.
- Two heaping cups potatoesMeasured raw, in uniform pieces, after paring — roughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound. Use a starchy potato (russet); waxy varieties mash into a gluey paste that will not hold a light ball.
- Why the potatoes are soakedSoaking pared raw potatoes draws out surface starch, which keeps the mash dry and fluffy. Drain them and the fish very thoroughly afterwards; wet mixture is the usual cause of balls that burst in the fat.
- Beat two minutesThis is the hinge. Beating the hot mash with butter and egg aerates it, and that air is what makes the interior light rather than dense. Do it while everything is still hot, and shape and fry promptly.
- Frying basketThe recipe calls for a frying-basket, but soft spoonfuls can stick to the wires and tear; dipping the spoon (or the basket) in the hot fat first helps the mixture release cleanly, and sliding them off a spoon straight into the oil also works.
- Brown paperGrocery-bag paper, the period's draining surface. Paper towels or a rack over a tray do the same job.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 balls, enough for four at breakfast. Traditionally served with baked beans, brown bread, or a spoonful of tomato or egg sauce.
Salt cod fish balls were a fixture of the New England Sunday-morning table, eaten alongside baked beans and brown bread — the fish and beans both being holdovers from a Saturday-cooking, Sabbath-keeping household economy. Dried salt cod was the backbone of Massachusetts commerce for two centuries before this book was printed, cheap enough to be an everyday food at home, with the poorest grades — the so-called refuse fish — going to the West Indies trade while better grades went to European and domestic markets. Fannie Farmer's version is characteristic of the Boston Cooking-School method: potatoes cut to uniform size *before* measuring, and a timed two minutes of beating rather than an instruction to beat until light. The insistence on reheating the fat between batches reflects a period when deep frying was done in a kettle over a coal or wood range, with no thermostat and no thermometer assumed.