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Boiled Fresh Codfish
Boil as directed, allowing ten minutes to each pound. Serve with oyster sauce, or drawn butter.
This is a cross-reference entry: the book expects you to have read its general directions for boiling fish a page or two earlier. What survives on its own is the ratio and the sauces, and the ratio is the part that needs rethinking.
- Ten minutes to the pound is far too longCod is done the moment the flakes separate and the flesh turns from translucent to opaque, roughly 140-145F at the thickest point. A 3 lb piece needs 15-20 minutes at a bare simmer, not 30, and thin tail pieces need under 10.
- "Boil" means poachWater at a rolling boil shreds cod and drives the albumin out in white curds. Bring the liquid to a boil, slide the fish in, then drop the heat so the surface barely trembles.
- Salt and acid in the waterMany period directions for boiled fish call for salted water, sometimes with a spoonful of vinegar or a slice of lemon; salt is said to firm the flesh and the acid to keep it white. This recipe specifies neither, but about a tablespoon of salt per quart is a safe starting point.
- Wrap itA whole fish or a thick cut should go into the pot wrapped in cheesecloth or laid on a rack, so it can be lifted out in one piece. Without that, a well-cooked cod comes apart on the fork you use to retrieve it.
- Drawn butterNot clarified butter in this period but a simple white sauce: about a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, thinned with a cup of hot water or fish cooking liquid, seasoned, then finished with more butter off the heat.
- Oyster sauceThe same drawn butter with shucked oysters and their liquor stirred in at the end. Give the oysters two minutes at most, only until the edges ruffle; longer cooking turns them to rubber.
- YieldFigure 1/2 lb of bone-in fish or 1/3 lb of fillet per person. Cold leftovers are the raw material for the fish hash and creamed codfish that appear elsewhere in books of this kind.
Cod was the cheap, plentiful, everywhere fish of the nineteenth-century American table, and the distinction this entry quietly draws — fresh codfish — mattered, because salt cod, stacked dry by the barrel and soaked overnight before use, was widely available and, it is often said, the more usual form in the household kitchen. Boiling was the standard treatment for a large fish in an era when ovens were unreliable and a kettle on the range was not, and the paired sauces are equally standard: drawn butter was the workhorse sauce of Anglo-American cookery, and oyster sauce its dress-up version, cheap enough to be ordinary when oysters were still being dredged by the bushel from Atlantic beds. The extreme brevity of the entry suits a book compiled by a pattern-and-magazine publisher for readers assumed to know the basics and to be reading the whole chapter, not one recipe in isolation.