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Cleaning Codfish
It is usual first to remove the gills by cutting their connection with the rest of the head and shoulders and pulling them out. Lay the fish on his back, open the belly by cutting down the center, remove the inside, carefully preserving the liver and roe, and leaving the sounds uninjured. If the fish is to be cooked whole it should be "scored" to the bone transversely at intervals of two inches; but if it is to be cooked in pieces, cut it in slices three inches thick and soak the fish in water for a quarter of an hour. Cod is crimped by being cut up and notched with a knife while partly alive; but some cooks object to this. The following recipes for cooking cod are carefully selected as likely to give sufficient variety to suit all tastes and to all purposes. The fish is usually divided, by the fishmonger, into "head and shoulders," "middle" and "tail;" but although preference may be given to the middle cut, the tail is quite as good, although not so fleshy, and the head yields in quantity the gelatine that makes excellent soup. Codlings are for the most part amenable to the same treatment.
Fillets of Codfish, Hollandaise Take any number of fillets of cod, put in a buttered stewpan, add one gill of stock, season, sprinkle a little fine parsley over, and set in the oven, or on the stove, with a buttered paper over. When done put them upon a dish, bordered with mashed potatoes.
Two things sit side by side here: a fishmonger's lesson in breaking down a whole cod, and a short recipe for fillets baked in stock. Both assume a kitchen that bought fish whole and knew what to do with every part of it.
- Skip the crimpingCrimping meant slashing the flesh of a fish that was still partly alive so it would set firm as it went into ice water. Oscar notes that some cooks objected even then; it has no place in a modern kitchen, and chilled fillets from a good counter give you the firm texture crimping was after.
- Sounds, liver and roeThe "sounds" are the swim bladders lying along the backbone, prized for their gelatin and once salted and sold separately. Cod liver and roe are still worth keeping if you buy the fish whole, though almost nothing sold at retail today arrives with them intact.
- A gill of stockHalf a cup, about 120 ml. Use a light fish or vegetable stock; chicken stock will overwhelm cod.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal. Moderate heat, 350F, is right for fillets braised in a shallow pool of liquid.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface from drying without sealing in steam the way a lid does. Parchment does the job exactly as written.
- When doneCod fillets in a moderate oven need roughly 10 to 12 minutes for a one-inch piece. Take them out when the flesh just separates into flakes under gentle pressure; the usual food-safety guidance for fish is 145F at the centre, though many cooks pull cod a little earlier. It passes from silky to chalky quickly.
- The missing sauceThe title promises hollandaise but the method never mentions it. Make hollandaise separately and spoon it over at the table, or hand it round in a sauceboat.
- The 15-minute soakThis applies to fresh cod cut in thick slices, not to salt cod; the recipe gives no reason for it. It is unnecessary with clean modern fillets and will only waterlog them.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity: it says simply 'take any number of fillets.' Figure 6 to 8 oz of fillet per person.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf, but as maître d'hôtel he put his name to the 1896 Cook Book, a fat compendium aimed as much at ambitious households as at professionals. Passages like this one, walking the reader through gilling and gutting a whole cod before offering a range of ways to cook it, show a New York in which fish came from the market whole and the buyer was expected to know the difference between the head-and-shoulders cut, the middle and the tail. Cod dominated the Northwest Atlantic trade and was cheap and constant enough to warrant extended treatment, while the practice of crimping — cutting a living fish to firm its flesh — was a genuine point of contention among nineteenth-century cooks and food writers, and Oscar's brief "some cooks object to this" registers that argument.