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Baked Codfish
Take a fresh cod and prepare it by tying up the head with string and filling the inside with maitre d'hotel butter, put the fish belly downward on a buttered drainer in a fish kettle, and pour over it a mixture made as follows: Melt two pounds of butter in a saucepan, add three quarts of chopped mushrooms, two blanched and chopped shallots, four tablespoonfuls of chopped parsley, the juice of two lemons, a crushed clove of garlic, and season to taste; all of these being partly cooked before used. Pour over the fish a pint and a half of white wine, and bring it quickly to a boil, then let cook gently for an hour and a half, basting the fish every ten minutes with the liquor. When the flesh is firm put the fish on a dish and pour over it half the fish stock, putting the rest in a sauce-boat. Any fish sauce may accompany it.
This is a banquet dish scaled for a hotel dining room: two pounds of butter and three quarts of mushrooms assume a whole cod of ten to fifteen pounds. The proportions work, but almost nobody now cooks a fish this size, and the cooking time belongs to another era of fish handling.
- The timing is the problemAn hour and a half will reduce cod to cotton wool. A whole fish, stuffed, wants roughly 10 minutes per inch measured at the thickest point, or until the flesh at the backbone is opaque and pulls cleanly from the bone; a large stuffed cod will usually be done well inside an hour. Oscar's instruction to stop "when the flesh is firm" is the real test, and it arrives long before his clock does.
- Scale it downFor a 3-4 lb fish or a thick centre-cut piece, use about 6 oz butter, 1 quart chopped mushrooms, 1 shallot, 2 tablespoons parsley, the juice of one lemon, and half a bottle of white wine. The garlic clove can stay as written; one clove in this volume is a whisper.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — nothing more. Make it firm, not melted, or it will run straight out of the fish.
- Fish kettle and drainerThe drainer is the perforated rack that lets you lift a whole fish out unbroken. A roasting pan with a wire rack, or a fish wrapped in a double sling of cheesecloth, does the same job. Cover loosely with foil if the exposed skin colours faster than the fish cooks.
- Oven or stovetopDespite the title, this reads as a braise: brought to the boil, then held at a bare simmer and basted. The book gives no oven temperature; if you move it to the oven, keep the heat low enough that the liquor never more than shivers, which is what "cook gently" means.
- Partly cooked firstThe mushrooms, shallots and parsley are sweated in the butter before they go over the fish. Skipping this leaves you with raw mushroom water diluting the sauce.
- The sauceThe cooking liquor will be thin and very buttery. Strain it, reduce it hard by half, and it becomes a proper sauce; poured off unreduced it floods the platter. "Any fish sauce" would have meant one of the standard restaurant fish sauces of the period.
- YieldIf the fish is as large as these proportions suggest, something like 12-15 servings. The scaled-down version above serves four to six.
Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen worked in the French idiom, and this is close to a classic poisson braisé au vin blanc under a plain American name — a whole fish set on a drainer, moistened rather than submerged, and basted until its own liquor becomes the sauce. The mushroom, shallot, parsley and lemon compound is close to a duxelles loosened with butter, a standby of nineteenth-century restaurant cooking. Cod was the cheap, abundant, respectable fish of the North Atlantic ports, and a large one made an impressive centrepiece for the price; the string tied around the head is presumably there to keep the jaw and cheeks from splaying open in the long cooking.