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Codfish à La Mode
1 cup salt codfish
2 eggs
2 cups mashed potatoes
¼ cup butter or other fat
2 cups milk or cream
Pepper
Pick very fine and freshen salt codfish. Mix with mashed potatoes, milk or cream, well-beaten egg, butter or other fat and pepper. Bake in an earthen dish twenty or twenty-five minutes.
A salt cod and potato pudding of the plainest sort, written for cooks who kept a piece of dried cod hanging in the pantry as a matter of course. The recipe gives no oven temperature and assumes you know how to freshen fish, which is the step that decides whether the dish is edible.
- Freshening is the hingeHard salt cod needs a soak of 12 to 24 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, with the water changed three or four times. Taste a shred before you commit it; if it is still aggressively salty, keep soaking. Nothing later in the recipe can rescue an under-soaked fish.
- What "1 cup" of codfish meansMost likely a cup of the fish after it has been picked fine rather than a cup of the dried plank, though the recipe does not say so outright. Reckon on roughly 4 to 6 oz of dried salt cod, which will gain weight as it rehydrates.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe does not even specify a 'moderate' oven. Something in the region of 350F for the stated 20 to 25 minutes suits a shallow dish of already-cooked ingredients that only needs to set and brown.
- An earthen dishA glazed earthenware or stoneware baking dish. Any modern ceramic or glass casserole works; metal is fine but browns the edges faster. Spread the mixture no more than about an inch and a half deep or the centre will still be cold when the top colours.
- Two cups of liquid is a lotWith 2 cups of mashed potato, this quantity of milk gives a loose, spoonable pudding rather than a sliceable cake. If your potatoes were made with milk and butter already, start with a cup and add more only until the mixture drops thickly from the spoon.
- No added salt, and mind the pepperThe recipe calls for pepper alone and no salt. Season only after the mixture is assembled and tasted, since the cod carries whatever salt is left in it.
- The eggsBeat them well and fold them in last, off the heat if the potatoes are warm, so they bind rather than scramble. They are what holds the pudding together as it sets.
- YieldServes four as a main dish with a green vegetable, six as a side. Leftovers firm up considerably and fry well in a little fat the next day.
Salt cod was one of the great staples of the North Atlantic trade, cured on the banks off Newfoundland and New England and shipped inland and abroad in wooden drums; it kept for months without ice and was cheap, which is why many American household books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry a run of codfish recipes -- balls, hash, creamed on toast, and puddings like this one. The emphasis throughout is on economy and the use of what is already in the house: cold mashed potato, a little milk, an egg or two. The name "a la mode" here carries none of its French precision and none of its American ice-cream sense; in books of this era it seems to have been attached loosely to any dish dressed up a little beyond its plainest form, in this case a fish hash given eggs and baked instead of fried.