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Codfish Scallop with Rice and Eggs
I 1½ cups creamed cod- 2 tablespoonfuls cream fish or 1 tablespoon ful butter I 1½ cups boiled rice 4 eggs Mix the cream or melted butter with the rice and arrange alternate layers of fish and rice in a buttered quart baking-dish, finishing with rice.
Carefully break four eggs on top, season the whites with salt, and sprinkle with a little cream or dot with butter. Bake in oven until heated and eggs "set," or individual ramekins may be used and an egg slipped on top of each.
A leftovers assembly rather than a recipe from scratch: layered fish and rice with eggs baked on top. The ingredient column has been mangled by the scanner, but the amounts are recoverable from the method.
- The ingredient list, untangledTwo columns have run together. It reads: 1½ cups creamed codfish, 1½ cups boiled rice, 4 eggs, and either 2 tablespoons cream or 1 tablespoon butter.
- "Creamed cod"Cooked flaked cod bound in a thick white sauce, a common dish of the period. If starting fresh, poach about 8 oz of cod and fold it into a cup of medium bechamel; the recipe does not say which cure is meant, but if using salt cod, soak and change the water several times first or the finished dish will be inedibly salty.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350F. Higher heat toughens the whites before the yolks warm through.
- The hinge: the eggsEverything under the eggs is already cooked, so the bake exists only to set them. Assemble the layers hot, then give 12 to 15 minutes at 350F — whites just opaque, yolks still soft. Past that point the yolks chalk and the fish dries out.
- Make a well for each egg"Carefully break four eggs on top" works only if the rice surface is dimpled first with the back of a spoon. Otherwise the whites slide to the edges of the dish and set into thin tags.
- Season the whites, not the yolksThe recipe salts only the whites. Salt sitting directly on a yolk can mottle the surface, which may be the reason; either way, salt the whites and grind pepper over at the table.
- Dish size and yieldA quart baking dish, which in modern terms is roughly a 9-inch pie plate. Serves four as a light supper. The ramekin version wants four 6-oz dishes and about 10 minutes.
- Rice"Boiled rice" is unspecified; plain long-grain, cooked past al dente and cooled, works well, and cooled or day-old rice layers better than fresh, which tends to pack into paste.
Creamed salt cod -- on toast, in pastry, or baked with potato -- was common on the American breakfast table well into the twentieth century, a legacy of the enormous Atlantic dried-cod trade that kept preserved fish in inland pantries year round. The formula here is typical of household-economy writing: a starch, a bound protein, and eggs baked on top to turn three remnants into something that could be carried to the table in its own dish. Baking eggs directly onto a gratin -- shirred, in the period's own term -- was a familiar way of making leftovers read as a composed course.