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Creamed Codfish and Macaroni
Heat one cup of creamed salt codfish with one cup of cooked macaroni, or macaroni and cheese, adding more cream or milk if necessary. Serve in a border of scrambled eggs. This makes an excellent breakfast relish.
A two-line assembly dish that assumes you already have creamed salt codfish and cooked macaroni sitting in the icebox. The only real work is getting the salt out of the fish.
- The hinge: soak the codSalt codfish must be freshened before it is creamed, or the dish is inedible. Cover with cold water and soak 8 to 24 hours in the refrigerator, changing the water three or four times, then poach gently and flake. Taste before you sauce it.
- What "creamed" means hereThe original presumes a thin white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or thin cream, with the flaked fish folded in. Taste before adding any salt; depending on how thoroughly the fish was soaked, little or none should be needed.
- Salt cod todayBoneless salt cod in a wooden box has largely given way to vacuum-packed loins from Portuguese or Caribbean groceries. How heavily these are salted varies, so judge the soak by tasting rather than by the package. Frozen desalted cod is also sold and needs no soaking.
- Macaroni was cooked differentlyPeriod macaroni was boiled soft, often 20 minutes or more. Cook to just past al dente here, since it will sit in hot sauce and continue to soften.
- Don't boil the mixtureReheat over low heat or in a double boiler. A cream sauce with cheese in it will break and go grainy if it comes to a boil, and the fish flakes will shred to threads.
- The egg borderScramble 4 to 6 eggs soft, spoon them around the edge of a warm platter and pile the fish and macaroni in the centre. Have the eggs ready last; they hold badly.
- YieldOne cup of fish and one cup of macaroni serves two generously as a breakfast dish, three if the eggs are counted as part of the meal.
Salt cod was the great cheap protein of the Atlantic world for centuries, and creamed salt codfish on toast was standard American breakfast fare well into the twentieth century, particularly in New England, where the dried-fish trade had been an economic mainstay since the colonial period. This book belongs to a genre that flourished from the 1890s through the Depression: the left-overs cookbook, which treated the second appearance of a dish as a subject worth systematic instruction rather than a domestic embarrassment. What is being reused here is itself a reused thing, creamed cod from an earlier meal combined with yesterday's macaroni, and the word "relish" in the last line carries its older sense of something savoury and appetite-provoking rather than a condiment in a jar.