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Scalloped Cod
Line a buttered baking-dish with cold flaked cod, sprinkle with salt and pepper, cover with a layer of oysters (first dipped in melted butter, seasoned with onion juice, lemon juice, and a few grains of cayenne, and then in cracker crumbs), add three tablespoons oyster liquor; repeat, and cover with buttered cracker crumbs. Bake twenty minutes in hot oven.
Serve with Egg or Hollandaise Sauce I.
A thrifty use for leftover boiled cod, dressed up with oysters. The only real difficulty is that the two components cook at very different rates.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no numbers; "hot oven" is usually rendered as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is enough to brown the crumb topping and heat the fish through, since the cod is already cooked.
- The oysters are the hingeShucked oysters need about two minutes of real heat before they tighten and turn rubbery. Buried under crumbs and flaked fish they are insulated, which is what makes the dish work, but do not extend the baking time to chase more colour on top — run the broiler for a minute instead.
- Cold flaked codThis assumes yesterday's poached or boiled fish. If starting from raw, poach a pound of cod in salted water until it flakes, cool it, and pick out any pin bones. Roughly 1 lb of cooked fish and a pint of shucked oysters fills a 1 1/2-quart dish.
- Oyster liquorThe liquid in the container of shucked oysters. Strain it through a fine sieve or cheesecloth to catch shell fragments; if there is less than the three tablespoons called for, top it up with a little cream rather than water.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning, made by grating an onion and pressing the pulp. A quarter teaspoon of the expressed juice per layer is plenty — it is meant to be undetectable as onion.
- Cracker crumbsCommon crackers or soda crackers, crushed fine — not seasoned breadcrumbs and not panko. Unsalted saltines are the closest modern equivalent; toss the topping crumbs with melted butter, about 3 tablespoons to a cup.
- Yield and sauceNo yield is given; at the quantities suggested above it would serve about four as a main course. Hollandaise I in this book is the standard butter-and-yolk emulsion; egg sauce is a white sauce with chopped hard-boiled egg, and is the plainer, more characteristic New England choice.
Scalloping — layering cooked fish or shellfish with buttered crumbs and baking — was the standard nineteenth-century New England answer to what to do with the remains of a boiled fish, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives scalloped versions of nearly everything that came out of the water. The pairing of cod with oysters reflects how cheap oysters still were in Boston at the turn of the century: they were a filler and a flavouring, sold by the quart from barrels, not the luxury they became after the eastern beds were fished out and polluted in the following decades. The dish also shows the school's institutional habit of cross-referencing rather than repeating itself — the sauce is not given here because it lives a few pages away, numbered, in the sauce chapter.