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Fried Cod's Tongues
Wash eighteen to twenty tongues, dip in cold milk, and roll one by one in flour. Put one teacupful of clarified butter in a fryingpan, lay in the tongues, keeping them separate and cook for three minutes; then turn on the other side and cook for three minutes longer. Serve with one gill of tomato sauce in a sauceboat.
Cod Tongues, Poulette Style Put eighteen tongues, blanched, in a saucepan, add a pint of Dutch sauce, half a gill of the stock in which they were blanched, and one teaspoonful of chopped parsley, and beat for five minutes without boiling. Put in a deep dish, sprinkle with parsley and serve.
Cod's Tongues with Black Butter Sauce Blanch eighteen cod's tongues, and put in a saucepan with half a gill of the liquor that they were blanched in, heat, but do not boil. Drain, dress on a hot dish and pour over one pint of black butter sauce. Braised Eel, Royal Style After skinning and cleaning, cut an eel into two-inch pieces, sprinkle with salt and let them remain for an hour or so. Plunge into a bowl of cold water for ten minutes, dry them, put in a well-buttered saucepan and season with grated nutmeg, salt and pepper, and over them place slices of lemons and shallots, also a little scraped parsley root and a few whole white peppers. Set the saucepan over a slow fire with hot ashes on the lid and braise until the fish is done. Place the pieces of eel on a dish; add to the saucepan one breakfast cupful of stock and boil for a few minutes and thicken with a white roux; let this reduce slightly; remove the pan from the fire, add a liaison of the yolks of three eggs, boil up once more, strain into a saucepan containing double its quantity of German sauce, boil up again, pour around the eel, and serve.
Four short fish preparations run together in this entry, all built on the same premise: cod tongues bought by the score and handled gently. The hinge in three of the four is temperature — the tongues are set with heat but never allowed to boil, or they tighten and go stringy.
- What a cod's tongue isNot a tongue but the fleshy muscle from the fish's lower jaw, cut out whole. It is a standard byproduct wherever cod is split for salting, still sold fresh and frozen in Newfoundland and parts of Scandinavia; elsewhere ask a fishmonger to save them. Eighteen to twenty serve three to four people as a course.
- Gill and teacupfulA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is a scant quarter cup. A teacupful in older American usage is generally taken as about six ounces rather than eight — for the frying butter, judge by the pan instead: enough to come partway up the tongues, not to submerge them.
- Dutch sauce and German sauceDutch sauce is hollandaise; German sauce (sauce allemande) is a veloute finished with egg yolks and cream, here presumably built on fish stock. Hollandaise is an egg emulsion and will break if pushed much above 180F, which is why the poulette is to be beaten "without boiling"; a roux-based allemande is rather more forgiving.
- Black butterBeurre noir — butter cooked past hazelnut brown until the milk solids are dark, then commonly sharpened with a splash of vinegar and sometimes capers. A pint is generous for eighteen tongues; half that is plenty by current appetites.
- "Beat for five minutes"For the poulette, this means swirling or stirring the pan steadily off direct heat so the sauce stays emulsified and the tongues warm through. Three or four minutes at a bare tremble is enough; they are already blanched and need only to heat.
- Frying timeThree minutes a side in shallow butter suits tongues of a decent size. Small ones will be done in half that — they are cooked when the flour crust is set and the flesh is opaque and just yielding. Overcooked, they turn to rubber quickly.
- Hot ashes on the lidA way of getting gentle heat from above as well as below. A low oven with the lid on does much the same job, though the book gives no temperature; eel cut into two-inch pieces will braise in roughly half an hour.
- The eel's saltingAn hour in salt followed by ten minutes in cold water firms the flesh and draws off some of the surface slime that skinning leaves behind. Do not skip the rinse or the finished dish will be too salty, since stock and sauce are added later.
- The liaisonThree yolks stirred into the reduced braising liquid, then "boil up once more" — treat that with caution rather than literally. The roux in the sauce gives the yolks some protection, but bringing it just to the point of thickening and pulling it off is the safer course.
Oscar Tschirky's book catalogues the Waldorf kitchen at a moment when American hotel cooking was still organised on French lines and nothing edible was thrown away. Cod tongues belong to the thrift end of that tradition: in the salt-cod ports of Newfoundland, Norway and New England, the split fish left behind cheeks, sounds and tongues, which cost little and were eaten locally long before they reached any hotel menu. What is striking here is the treatment — the same cut appears fried plain with tomato sauce, in a poulette of hollandaise and parsley, and dressed with black butter, three classical French finishes applied to an offcut. Cod tongues remain a regional delicacy in Newfoundland, usually floured and fried in pork fat with scrunchions, which is close to the first of these three. The eel that follows was equally unremarkable in 1896: eel was common in New York markets and on hotel carte, and its near-disappearance from American tables has more to do with changing taste and collapsing stocks than with the fish itself.