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Matelote of Codfish
Remove the head and bones of a fish, fill the insides with stuffings made from half a pint of oysters, one pint of breadcrumbs, a little pepper, a little salt, two table spoonfuls of butter, one egg, half an onion and half a tablespoonful of chopped parsley. Take six slices of bacon, put three on the bottom and three on the top of the fish and bake for an hour, basting with butter and gravy made from the bones boiled in water.
A boned whole cod stuffed with an oyster forcemeat and barded with bacon. The one number to distrust is the hour in the oven.
- The hinge: baking timeAn hour will reduce a boned cod to dry flakes. The recipe names no size of fish; a stuffed boned fish of about 3-4 lb needs roughly 30 to 40 minutes at 350F. Because the stuffing contains raw oysters and a raw egg, take both the thickest part of the flesh and the centre of the stuffing to 145F. Judge by the thermometer, not the clock.
- Oven heatOscar gives none; recipes of this kind commonly left the heat to the cook. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this; anything hotter will set the outside before the stuffing warms.
- "Remove the head and bones"This means boning the fish while keeping it whole -- split it along the backbone from the belly side, lift out the spine and ribs, and leave the two fillets joined by the skin of the back so it can be filled and closed. A fishmonger will do it if asked.
- Half a pint of oystersAbout a cup, or 8 ounces of shucked oysters with their liquor -- roughly 12 to 18 depending on size. Add the liquor to the crumbs; it carries most of the flavor. Chop large oysters, leave small ones whole.
- A pint of breadcrumbsMeasured by volume: a pint of soft torn crumbs from day-old bread runs about 3 to 4 ounces, while a pint of fine dry crumbs is denser and closer to 8 ounces. Soft crumbs give a lighter stuffing; dry crumbs will need extra liquid beyond the oyster liquor.
- The baconThis is barding, not seasoning. Six slices laid above and below keep the lean cod from drying and supply the fat for basting. Use unsmoked or lightly smoked bacon so it does not dominate the oysters.
- The gravy from the bonesFish bones give all they have in 20 to 30 minutes; simmered longer they turn bitter and glue-like. Cover the head and frame with cold water, bring barely to a simmer, skim, and strain.
- YieldA 3-4 lb fish so treated serves four to six as a main course, with the pan juices and a little of the reduced bone stock spooned over.
The name is loose. A matelote in French cooking is a sailor's stew of fish braised in wine with onions and mushrooms, associated broadly with French river-fish cookery, and it is properly a dish of pieces in liquid rather than a stuffed and baked whole fish. American hotel menus of the 1890s and 1900s used French terms freely as marks of standing, and Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf kitchen's own vocabulary rather than an academic one. What the recipe does show plainly is how cheap oysters were on the East Coast at the turn of the century: half a pint of them goes into a stuffing for a fish that was itself among the most ordinary things a New York cook could buy, and the pairing of cod with oysters and salt pork or bacon runs back through New England cookery well before the Waldorf existed.