Fried Fresh Cod
Wash the steaks carefully, season, dip in egg, roll in bread or cracker crumbs, and fry in a hot batter.
A one-line recipe that assumes the cook already knows how deep-fat and pan-frying work. Two things need clarifying before you start: what the last three words are supposed to say, and how little time cod actually needs.
- "Fry in a hot batter"Almost certainly a misprint for hot fat: the only batter here is the egg-and-crumb coating already described. Use a shallow depth of oil or clarified butter in a heavy skillet, or two inches of oil for deep frying.
- Fat temperature350-375F. Below that the crumb coat absorbs oil and slides off; above it the crumbs brown before the centre of a thick steak sets.
- Cod steaksCross-cut steaks on the bone, about an inch thick, are what the recipe's "steaks" implies and were a common market form at the time. Loin fillets are what you will find now and work much the same, though tail-end pieces thinner than half an inch overcook before they colour.
- TimingThree to four minutes a side for an inch-thick steak, to 145F at the centre. Cod flakes and dries quickly past that point; the original gives no time at all.
- Coating that stays onPat the fish thoroughly dry, season, then flour lightly before the egg. Skipping flour is why crumbs lift away in the pan. Let the breaded steaks rest ten minutes before frying.
- SeasonSalt and pepper is what the book means. Salt the fish rather than the crumbs — crumbs shed, and any salt in them goes with them.
- CrumbsCracker crumbs give a coarser, sturdier crust than bread crumbs and were often preferred for fish; dry bread crumbs brown faster and need the lower end of the fat range.
- Yield and servingFigure one 6-8 oz steak per person. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside does not steam, and send it out with lemon, or with the tartare or egg sauce the fish chapters of this period take for granted.
Cod was the cheapest and most universally available fish on the American Atlantic coast when the Butterick book appeared, sold fresh in steaks, salted in boxes, and dried in planks, and a fish chapter of the period will run through boiled, baked, creamed, hashed and fried versions of it in a couple of pages. The brevity here is characteristic of the genre: egg-and-crumb frying was so routine that the compilers gave it a single sentence, on the assumption that the reader had already absorbed the general directions for frying elsewhere in the book. The extreme abundance did not last — the Grand Banks and Georges Bank stocks that made cod a poor family's staple collapsed late in the twentieth century, and cod at market today is a considerably more expensive fish than the one this recipe was written for.