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Fried Salt Pork with Codfish
Cut fat salt pork in one-fourth inch slices, cut gashes onethird inch apart in slices, nearly to rind. Try out in a hot frying-pan until brown and crisp, occasionally turning off fat from pan. Serve around strips of codfish which have been soaked in pan of lukewarm water and allowed to stand on back of range until soft. Serve with Drawn Butter Sauce, boiled potatoes, and beets.
A plain New England supper of two preserved staples, written for a cook who kept both in the pantry as a matter of course. Two words in it need translating before anything else.
- "Try out" means renderThe pork is not breaded or pan-fried in added fat; it is rendered in a dry, hot pan so that its own fat runs out and the slices crisp. Start over medium-high heat and pour the accumulated fat into a heatproof cup as it collects — this is the hinge of the dish. Left sitting in its own grease, the pork deep-fries and stays limp instead of turning brittle.
- The gashesScoring the slices at third-inch intervals down to but not through the rind keeps them from curling into cups as the fat contracts, and gives the render more edges to escape from. Modern salt pork often comes rindless, in which case cut most of the way through and handle the slices carefully.
- Salt pork todayLook for fat salt pork or fatback in slabs, not the lean streaky belly sold as a bacon substitute. The recipe specifies no quantity; sliced a quarter inch thick, a pound of slab will yield roughly eight or nine slices, depending on the shape of the piece.
- Soaking the salt codIgnore the lukewarm water and the back of the range. Whole dried salt cod needs 24 to 48 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, changed three or four times; thinner fillets need 12 to 24. Rehydrating salted fish at room temperature over many hours invites the spoilage bacteria the salt was there to prevent.
- Cook the fishSoaking alone leaves the cod raw. After soaking, poach the strips in barely simmering unsalted water for 8 to 10 minutes, until they flake, and drain well. Do not boil hard or the flesh shreds and toughens.
- Drawn butter sauceIn this book that is not clarified butter but a light flour-thickened sauce: butter and flour cooked together, whisked into about a cup and a half of hot water or fish poaching liquid, and finished with a further lump of butter. Follow the book's own Drawn Butter Sauce recipe for the exact proportions. Salt with restraint — the cod and pork both carry plenty.
- Salt overallNothing else in the meal should be salted before tasting. The boiled potatoes and beets read as bland ballast against two cured ingredients.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggested here would serve about four as a main course, the pork arranged as a border around the fish on a warmed platter.
Salt pork and salt cod were the two pillars of the New England larder, both of them shelf-stable protein in a region with long winters and a vast fishery; the Massachusetts cod trade was substantial enough by the eighteenth century that a carved codfish still hangs in the State House. Serving them together, with boiled potatoes and beets and a flour-thickened butter sauce, was ordinary household eating rather than a composed dish, and Fannie Farmer records it in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book without any note of introduction. The instruction to let the fish stand "on back of range until soft" belongs to a coal or wood stove, whose cooler rear surface held a gentle residual warmth all day and served as the period's all-purpose warming shelf otern kitchen has, and in this case just as well.