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Fried Cod
Cut a cod in slices, dust with pepper and salt and let remain for two hours. Wipe the slices dry, dip in yolk of egg and then in breadcrumbs, mix with flour, season and put in pan with plenty of fat and fry quickly. The tail is best for frying, and after removing the skin and bones, cut in slices and press with a cutlet bat.
Fried Codfish, Maitre d'Hotel Trim a few fillets of cod and dip them in flour. Rub some breadcrumbs through a wire sieve, whisk two whole eggs, season, and dip the fillets in the eggs, roll in the breadcrumbs and fry to a light brown. Serve with maitre d'hotel sauce in a boat.
Two variations on the same idea: salted, breaded cod fried hard and fast. The instructions are compressed in the Waldorf style, and a few of the steps assume knowledge a professional kitchen of 1896 took for granted.
- The two hours of saltDusting the slices with salt and pepper and leaving them two hours is a dry brine; it firms the flesh and draws out water so the coating adheres and the fish does not steam in the pan. Wiping the slices genuinely dry afterwards is the hinge of the whole recipe — damp fish sheds its breadcrumbs into the fat.
- "Mix with flour, season"The phrasing is garbled shorthand for seasoned flour in the breading sequence: flour, then egg yolk, then crumbs. The second version states it clearly, and that order is the one to follow.
- Cutlet batA flat, heavy metal or wooden paddle used to flatten meat, similar in function to the smooth face of a modern meat mallet. The point is to even out the thickness of the tail slices, not to tenderise; a few firm presses with the flat of a heavy pan does the same thing.
- Why the tailThe recipe gives no reason, but the tail end is firmer and holds together better in hot fat than the flakier shoulder. Loin cuts of similar thickness work; thin belly flap does not.
- "Plenty of fat" and "fry quickly"Shallow-fry in fat about half the depth of the fish at 350–375F. Too cool and the crumb absorbs grease before the fish sets; the whole method depends on a fast brown crust.
- DonenessCod is done at 145F internal, which for a 3/4-inch slice is roughly three minutes a side. It goes from flaking to dry and cottony very quickly, so pull it when the flesh just separates.
- Maître d'hôtel sauceIn this period the term usually meant butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, either as a soft compound butter melting over the fish or loosened with a little stock into a light sauce. A "boat" is a sauceboat, served alongside rather than poured over, so the crust stays crisp.
- YieldNeither version gives a quantity. Figure 6–8 oz of trimmed cod per person; a 2 lb tail piece serves four.
Cod was cheap and plentiful on the American Atlantic coast when Oscar Tschirky compiled this book, arriving at New York markets in enormous quantity from the Grand Banks and the New England fleets, which is why a hotel as grand as the Waldorf could print a number of ways with it and why the book treats the fish as an everyday matter rather than a luxury. The two versions here show the split running through the whole volume: the first is plain household frying, the second the same fish dressed in the French service vocabulary Oscar had absorbed somewhere in his career, with trimmed fillets, sieved crumbs and a sauce sent separately in a boat. Maître d'hôtel butter — parsley, lemon and butter — is generally traced to early nineteenth-century French practice and was by this date the default finish for a plain grilled or fried fish, so ubiquitous that a cookbook of the period could name it without explanation and expect to be understood.