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Codfish Balls
Take the bone from a piece of fish, make it weigh six ounces, soak in cold water, put in a saucepan and boil for half an hour. Pound it to a pulp, being careful that all the bones are removed. Boil a half pound of potatoes and when done mash them up with the fish, adding a tablespoonful of melted butter and one egg. Make this into balls and fry to a light brown.
A plain salt-cod cake, written for a cook who already knew the ratio: roughly equal weights of soaked fish and boiled potato, bound with one egg. Two points carry the dish — the soak and the frying medium.
- The fish is salt cod"A piece of fish" soaked in cold water and boiled means dried salt cod, not fresh. Fresh cod needs no soaking and will fall apart into wet shreds rather than the firm pulp the recipe expects.
- Soak longer than impliedThe recipe gives no soaking time. Hard-dried salt cod wants 12 to 24 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, with the water changed three or four times. Taste a shred before cooking; if it is still aggressively salty, keep soaking, because you cannot correct it later.
- Half an hour is too longOnce soaked, cod is done when it flakes — 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer. A hard half-hour boil toughens the fibres and makes them stringy rather than tender.
- WeightsSix ounces of boned fish (the recipe has you weigh it before soaking) to eight ounces of potato. That is about 170 g to 225 g.
- PotatoesUse a floury variety — russet or a baking potato — and boil them whole in their skins, then peel and mash while hot. Waterlogged potato is the usual reason these cakes collapse in the fat.
- "Pound to a pulp"A mortar or the flat of a heavy knife is closer to the intent than a food processor, which turns cod into paste. You want shredded fibres still visible in the mash.
- Frying"Fry to a light brown" is all the recipe says; deep fat at around 360-375F for two to three minutes will do it. They will also brown well in half an inch of oil in a skillet if the balls are flattened slightly into cakes. Chilling the shaped balls for 20 minutes first helps them hold.
Salt cod was among the cheapest and most widely available proteins in the American northeast for generations, and codfish balls were a New England breakfast staple long before they reached a Fifth Avenue dining room — often eaten Sunday mornings with baked beans and brown bread. Oscar Tschirky's inclusion of so unglamorous a dish in The Cook Book (1896) sits alongside the elaborate French service the Waldorf was known for. The economy of the method is a relic of the trade itself — cod split and salted aboard the Grand Banks fleet, then dried, kept for months without ice, which is why a hotel kitchen in Manhattan and a farmhouse in Maine could be working from the same cured fish.