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Baked Cod's Head
Trim and wash well the head of a cod, fill the gills with veal stuffing, put the head in a baking dish, season with pepper and salt, also add a little parsley; moisten with a pint of sherry and a little catsup, put a buttered paper over and set in the oven to bake. The fish must be well basted while baking, and a pint of stock may be added to keep it moist. When the head is nearly done sprinkle it over with fine raspings of bread, and when it is quite done put it upon a dish. Add two gills of brown sauce to the liquor in the baking pan, strain in a stewpan, and put in a little essence of anchovy, two ounces of butter and a little lemon juice; boil the sauce for a few minutes, pour on the cod and serve.
Salted Cod, Biscayan Style Bone two pounds of cod and soak in cold water for a day, place in a saucepan with fresh water and simmer till boiling, then add fresh water and let boil again; take out and scale. Fry two chopped onions and one green pepper in a gill of oil for five minutes, add a sliced tomato, one clove of bruised garlic and one chili pepper. Moisten these with three pints of broth, add a small bunch of parsley, three tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce and one pint of peeled potatoes, and cook for forty minutes; then add the cod and boil again for five minutes.
Two cod recipes run together here: a baked head with a rich sherry-and-brown-sauce gravy, and a Basque-style salt cod stew. Both are workable today, though the first requires a fishmonger who will sell you a head.
- Getting the headAsk for a large cod head, 2-3 lb, with the collar meat attached — that collar and the cheeks are the eating. Have the gills removed; "fill the gills" means packing the stuffing into the emptied gill cavity behind the jaw.
- Veal stuffingThis means a forcemeat of ground veal bound with breadcrumbs, egg and herbs. Any well-seasoned bread-and-herb stuffing works; it is there to hold shape and season the cavity rather than to be served on its own.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F, basting often, until the flesh at the thickest part of the collar reaches 145F and the cheek meat pulls free easily — roughly 30 to 45 minutes for a head this size. Overcooked cod turns dry and stringy quickly.
- A gill and a pintA gill is half a cup, so two gills of brown sauce is one cup, and a gill of oil in the salt cod is half a cup. The pint of sherry in the baking dish is generous by modern taste; half that plus stock gives the same result with less sweetness.
- Buttered paperButtered parchment laid directly on the fish, not sealed to the dish. It keeps the surface from drying while still letting the liquid reduce. Remove it before adding the breadcrumbs.
- Raspings and essence of anchovyRaspings are dry crumbs grated from the crust of stale bread — fine dried breadcrumbs. Essence of anchovy was a bottled anchovy-and-vinegar sauce; anchovy paste, about a teaspoon, is the closest substitute, or a dash of Worcestershire.
- CatsupIn this period catsup could still mean mushroom or walnut as well as tomato, and such catsups were thinner and sharper than the modern bottled kind. Mushroom ketchup, or a spoonful of soy plus a little vinegar, may read closer to the intent than sweet tomato ketchup.
- Salt cod soakingThe day-long soak is not optional, and the water needs changing three or four times. The recipe's double boil-and-refresh is a further desalting step; taste the fish before it goes into the stew and repeat if it is still aggressively salty.
- YieldA baked head serves two as a main course, or four as a first course with the sauce. The Biscayan salt cod, with two pounds of fish and a pint of potatoes, serves four to six.
Cod heads were standard nineteenth-century economy: the head and collar were sold cheap or thrown in free, and English and American cookbooks treated a baked head as a legitimate dinner dish rather than scrap. That it appears in a Waldorf book, dressed with sherry, brown sauce and anchovy essence, shows how a thrifty item could be pulled up into hotel cooking by the sauce around it. The second recipe, bacalao a la vizcaína, comes from the Basque coast, whose fleets fished the Newfoundland banks and salted their catch on board; the Biscayan style is generally associated with peppers, onions and tomato, and Oscar's version with garlic, chili and potatoes is a plausible New York reading of it. Salt cod bridged both worlds — a preserved fish that traveled everywhere, and one that a hotel kitchen could keep on hand indefinitely.