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Boiled Codfish with Hollandaise Sauce
Take the gills from a cod, also the entrails where the gills form a hole, chop off the fins and sprinkle over the fish a little salt, also putting some inside, then place in a cold place and let it remain for a few hours. Take it up, wash off the salt, tie the head with string, put it in a bowl of water and milk and let it disgorge for about three-quarters of an hour. Take it out and drain, put belly downward on a drainer in a fish kettle with enough cold salted water to cover it, add three cupfuls of milk and boil slowly until the cut begins to open.
This is a whole-fish method from a hotel kitchen that bought cod by the barrel and had a copper fish kettle standing ready. The technique still works at home with a roasting pan and a rack, provided you read "boil slowly" as the Victorian kitchen meant it.
- Never actually boil itThe hinge of the whole recipe. "Boil slowly" in old cookery is generally read as a bare simmer, water trembling with a bubble breaking now and then, rather than a rolling boil, which shreds the flakes apart and loosens the fish from the bone before the centre is warm. The recipe itself specifies no temperature.
- Doneness"Until the cut begins to open" most likely refers to the belly/throat opening left by gutting gaping as the flesh contracts, though the text is not explicit. As a modern check, figure about 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point; 145F at the spine is the usual recommendation. A large cod steak or a 3-4 lb piece is far more practical than a whole market-sized fish.
- The milk soakThe 45-minute rest in milk and water is the "disgorging" step, traditionally said to draw residual blood from the belly cavity and firm the flesh; how much it actually does is another matter. Discard the soaking liquid; do not carry it into the poaching pot.
- Milk in the poaching liquidThe three cupfuls of milk are traditionally added to help keep the flesh white rather than to flavour it, though the recipe does not say so. Diluted in a kettleful of water it is unlikely to catch, but a bare simmer and an eye on the pot do no harm.
- Salting aheadThe initial salt and the few hours in a cold place amount to a short dry cure. Modern equivalent: a light, even sprinkle inside and out, then uncovered on a rack in the refrigerator. Rinse it off as instructed or the finished fish will be aggressively salty on top of the salted poaching water.
- Tying the headString around the head and jaw keeps the fish from gaping and losing its shape in the water. If your fishmonger has already given you a headless piece, wrap it instead in a double layer of cheesecloth with long ends, which also gives you a way to lift it out unbroken.
- Fish kettle and drainerThe drainer is the perforated tray that sits inside a fish kettle. A wire cooling rack set in a deep roasting pan, straddling two burners, does the same job. The point is that the fish never touches the metal and can be lifted out flat.
- The hollandaiseNo sauce method is given here despite the title, so any butter-and-yolk hollandaise, held warm rather than hot, is what the title implies.
- YieldUnstated in the recipe. As a modern estimate, reckon 6-8 oz of boneless cooked fish per person; a 4 lb dressed cod serves four to five.
Boiled cod with an egg-and-butter sauce was one of the fixed points of nineteenth-century Anglo-American hotel dining, and it arrived at the Waldorf with a long pedigree behind it: New England had eaten cod salted and fresh since the colonial fisheries, and the British table had long paired boiled cod with oyster or egg sauce. What makes this a hotel recipe rather than a home one is the assumption of a whole fish and a fish kettle with a lift-out drainer, equipment that let a kitchen present the cod intact on a platter. The hollandaise is a French overlay, a mark of the period when American grand hotels were translating a plain Protestant fish dinner into something that could be listed on a menu in French. The milk in the poaching water is an old professional trick for whiteness.