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Baked Codfish with Cream
Take the tail of a cod, clean it, and boil in salted water with a little parsley. When it is done wipe and open down the back, remove the bones and break the meat into pieces. Place these pieces in layers, and between each one a little bechamel sauce slightly reduced with cream, also a piece of butter and nutmeg. Sprinkle a few breadcrumbs on top and brown it.
A gratin built from poached cod and béchamel, written in the shorthand a professional kitchen used when the sauce and the stockpot were already standing. The only real technique is restraint at the poaching stage.
- The hinge: underpoach the fishCod is done the moment the flakes separate under gentle pressure, roughly 8-10 minutes at a bare shiver for a thick tail piece. It goes back under heat to brown, so pull it while it is barely set or the finished gratin will be dry and cottony.
- "The tail of a cod"Oscar means the tail end of a whole fish, bone in, which holds together in the poaching liquid. A 1.5-2 lb tail section, or two thick loin fillets if the fishmonger has no tails, gives the same result. Boneless fillets need a shorter poach and gentler handling.
- Salted water with parsleyThis is a minimal court bouillon. A generous tablespoon of salt per quart, parsley stems, and a slice of onion or lemon if you like; keep it at a shiver rather than a rolling boil, which shreds the flesh.
- Bechamel "slightly reduced with cream"Make a standard bechamel and simmer it down with a few tablespoons of heavy cream until it coats a spoon heavily. It must be thicker than a pouring sauce, since the fish will shed moisture into the dish.
- NutmegFreshly grated, and less than instinct suggests: a couple of scrapes per layer. Pre-ground nutmeg from a jar is flat by comparison and easy to overdo.
- "Brown it"In a hotel kitchen of this period that most likely meant a salamander, the overhead grill, though the book specifies nothing. Use a broiler 4-5 inches from the element for 3-4 minutes, or a hot oven at 450F for about 10 minutes if the assembled dish has gone cold.
- Crumbs and butterThe recipe says only "a few breadcrumbs," and butter appears between the layers rather than on top. Dry crumbs crust better than fresh, which absorb sauce and turn to paste; dotting the top with butter as well is a modern addition.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. As a rough working estimate, a 2 lb tail with about a cup of sauce fills a shallow 8-inch gratin dish and will serve about four as a main course, six as a first course.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms rather than its stoves, and his 1896 book reads throughout like a maitre d'hotel transcribing what the kitchen already knew: sauces are assumed, quantities are absent, and finishing instructions run to two words. This dish is a plain gratin of cod, the French domestic habit of rescuing poached white fish under bechamel and crumbs. The nutmeg is the tell of an older tradition still: grated nutmeg in a white sauce runs straight back through eighteenth-century English and French cookery, where it was the standard warm note for anything bound with milk and butter.