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Boiled Codfish with Cream Sauce
Take out the inside of a cod by the white skin of the belly, taking care to remove all blood. Place the fish in a kettle with salted cold water and boil fast at first and then slowly. When done take out and skin. Pour over it sauce made as follows: A quarter pound of butter put in a stew pan with one tablespoonful of flour, moisten with a pint of cream, add a little salt and pepper and a teaspoonful of essence of anchovies; place the pan on the fire, let thicken but not boil.
A whole poached cod with a butter-and-cream sauce, written for a kitchen that bought fish ungutted and cooked it on a coal range. Two instructions need rethinking: the boil and the sauce ratio.
- Do not actually boil it"Boil fast at first and then slowly" is a formula common in nineteenth-century cookery, possibly reflecting a range whose heat was easier to build than to reduce. Cod at a rolling boil sheds its flakes and turns cottony; bring the salted water to a bare shiver, about 175F, and hold it there. The recipe gives no size, but a whole fish of 4-5 lb is done at 130-140F at the thickest point, roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness.
- Gutting through the bellyThe direction to draw the fish through the white belly skin and remove all blood assumes a whole ungutted cod. Any fishmonger will do this; ask for the fish gutted and scaled, head on, and rinse the cavity well, since residual blood along the spine turns bitter and clouds the poaching water.
- The skin comes off hotLift the fish out on a rack or cloth and peel the skin immediately, while it is still steaming. Cooled cod skin grips the flesh and tears it.
- Essence of anchoviesA commercial Victorian and Edwardian bottling of anchovy, salt and spice, similar to what is now sold as anchovy sauce. Use a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two mashed oil-packed fillets, and season at the end since the paste is salty.
- A pint of creamOscar's book is American, so read this as 16 fl oz, 2 cups. Heavy cream gives the intended body; half-and-half will taste thin against a quarter pound of butter.
- The sauce is not a bechamelOne tablespoon of flour to 4 oz butter and 2 cups cream is a butter sauce lightly bound, not a white sauce. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before adding the cream, then hold it below a simmer as directed. With this little flour to hold it together, boiling risks the butter separating out.
- YieldThe recipe gives no size or number of servings. This quantity of sauce would suit a whole fish of 4-5 lb, or about 2 lb of fillets if you would rather skip the whole fish.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working repertoire of the Waldorf-Astoria around the turn of the twentieth century, when a large boiled fish with a cream sauce was standard hotel and household fare on both sides of the Atlantic, and cod was the cheap, abundant backbone of the Northeast fishery. The dish belongs to a family of English boiled-fish services in which the sauce carries all the flavor, and the anchovy essence here is the giveaway: bottled anchovy is often said to have served Victorian and Edwardian cooks much as a splash of fish sauce serves a modern one, giving a bland white fish some savory depth without announcing itself. Instructions like "boil fast at first and then slowly" survived in print long after they made sense, a habit plausibly inherited from coal and wood ranges whose heat could be built up but not quickly reduced.