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Boiled Salted Cod
Steep two pounds of salted cod and put in tepid water for six hours; then take it out and place it for the same length of time in cold water, changing about every half hour. Put the fish in a gallon saucepan filled with water, and when it boils put on the side and let simmer for five minutes. Boiled Salted Cod with Egg Sauce Chop fine one pound of freshly-salted cod that has been soaked, boiled, and allowed to get cold. Mix one teaspoonful of corn meal with one cupful of milk, and stir on the fire till it thickens, then add half a pound of mashed potatoes rubbed through a sieve, two ounces of butter, one dessertspoonful of chopped parsley, two beaten eggs and pepper to taste. (2.) Boil two eggs for ten minutes, cut them into large dice, and put in one pint of melted butter sauce. When the fish is done pour this over it and serve.
Three related preparations have been run together into one paragraph here, which is typical of Oscar's terse style: a plain boiled salt cod, a bound cod-and-potato mixture, and the egg sauce that gives the dish its name. Read it as three parts before you start.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: don't let it boil hard -- Salt cod tightens and goes stringy if held at a rolling boil. The recipe brings the pot up, then draws it to the side of the range to simmer for five minutes, which is enough for fish that flakes under a fork.
- Soaking, in modern termsTwelve hours total — six in tepid water, six in cold with changes every half hour. Do the cold stage in the refrigerator rather than on the counter, and taste a shred before cooking; heavily salted dried cod may want a full day, while lightly salted wet-cured fish needs far less.
- "Freshly-salted cod"This most likely means lightly wet-salted fish rather than the board-stiff dried salt cod sold in wooden boxes today. If you are working with the hard-dried kind, expect longer soaking.
- Corn meal in the milkA teaspoon of cornmeal will not thicken a cup of milk to any degree. Cornstarch may have been intended; one teaspoon to a cup of milk gives the light binding panada the mixture needs. The mashed potato does most of the binding in any case.
- Melted butter sauceNineteenth-century "melted butter" is drawn butter sauce — butter, flour and water or fish stock cooked to a thin coating sauce — not simply butter melted in a pan. A pint of it is a generous amount; a cup will dress a dish for four.
- The eggsTen minutes gives fully set, faintly chalky yolks. Eight is plenty for eggs meant to be diced and suspended in sauce, and they cut more cleanly if cooled in water first.
- The second mixture is unfinishedThe cod, potato, butter, parsley and egg mixture is given no cooking direction. It reads as a fish pudding or cake mixture: bake it in a buttered dish in a moderate oven until set and lightly colored, or shape it into cakes and fry them. Chill the mixture first so it holds together.
- YieldTwo pounds of salt cod, once soaked, serves roughly four to six as a main course. The potato mixture, using one pound, will make something like eight cakes.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria as maitre d'hotel, and his 1896 collection records what a large New York hotel kitchen actually cooked rather than what was fashionable. Salt cod earned its place there for the same reason it appeared in nearly every American cookbook of the century: dried and salted Atlantic cod kept indefinitely without ice, moved cheaply inland, and was a staple across the Northeast, in Protestant New England households as well as Catholic ones observing Friday and Lent. The pairing with egg sauce is New England's, carried into the hotel repertoire more or less unchanged, and the second preparation here ccod worked with mashed potato, butter and egg is a version of the codfish ball, a dish already well established in New England cookery and one the same period's Boston cookbooks treat as a breakfast staple. That a hotel famous for its lobster and canvasback also printed a plain boiled salt cod says something about how broad an American hotel menu still was in the 1890s.