Boiled Codfish
Soak over night, put in a pan of cold water, and simmer two cr three hours. Serve with drawn butter, with hard-boiled eggs sliced on it. Codfish is also excellent broiled. After soaking sufficiently, grease the bars of the gridiron, broil, and serve with bits of butter dropped over it. This is a nice relish for tea. -Mrs. Lewis Brown.
This is salt cod, not fresh — the overnight soak and the multi-hour simmer only make sense for hard-dried, heavily salted fish. Two points govern the result: how long you soak, and never letting the pot boil.
- Which codThe recipe assumes a stiff, bone-dry salted side of cod, the kind sold in a wooden box. Modern lightly salted fillets are far wetter and less salty; they need only a few hours of soaking, not a night.
- SoakingSoak skin-side up in a generous volume of cold water in the refrigerator, changing the water three or four times. Overnight suits hard-dried fish; taste a slver of the thickest part before cooking and keep soaking if it is still aggressively salty.
- "Simmer two or three hours" That timing belongs to plank-hard nineteenth-century cod. Even properly rehydrated salt cod is done in 15 to 25 minutes; the flesh should just separate into flakes. Held longer it goes stringy and cottony.
- Never boilSalt cod toughens the moment the water breaks into a rolling boil. Bring it up slowly from cold and hold the water at a bare shiver, with only occasional bubbles at the edge of the pan.
- Drawn butterIn this period drawn butter is not simply melted butter but a light white sauce: roughly 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour cooked together, then whisked with a cup of hot water or the fish liquor (use the liquor sparingly, it is salty) and finished with more butter. Sliced hard-boiled egg goes over the top.
- BroilingGreasing the gridiron bars matters — soaked cod sticks and shreds. Under a modern broiler, set the rack about 4 inches from the element and give it 3 to 4 minutes a side until the surface blisters and browns.
- "A nice relish for tea"Tea here is the light evening meal, and the broiled cod is a savoury alongside bread and butter rather than a main course.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Reckon on roughly 6 oz of soaked fish per person; a 1 lb piece of dried salt cod, once rehydrated, will serve about four.
Salt cod was the great ambulatory protein of the Atlantic world, dried on flakes in Newfoundland and New England and shipped inland and southward in barrels and boxes long before refrigeration reached the household kitchen. That is why a book compiled in the American South carries several cod recipes despite the fish being caught far to the north of southern waters — it arrived preserved, kept indefinitely on a dry shelf, and cost little. The pairing with drawn butter and sliced hard-boiled egg is the standard nineteenth-century English and American treatment for any plain boiled white fish, and it survives today in the salt cod and egg dishes of New England.