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Boiled Fresh Cod
Put the fish in fish-kettle (or tie up in cloth) in boiling water with some salt and scraped horse-radish, let simmer till done, place a folded napkin on a dish, turn fish upon it, and serve with drawn butter, oyster or egg-sauce. When cold, chop fine, pour over it drawn butter or egg sauce, and add pepper to taste, warm thoroughly, stirring to prevent burning, make up in rolls or any other form, and brown before the fire.
A two-part entry: a plain poached cod, then instructions for turning the leftovers into a browned fish roll. The whole thing hangs on not letting the water move much.
- Simmer means barely tremblingCod flakes apart the moment the water rolls. Bring the pot to a boil, then drop it back so the surface only shivers, and hold it there. A thick cut steak or small whole fish takes roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness; it is done when the flesh at the bone turns opaque and separates cleanly.
- The cloth is not optional in spiritA fish kettle has a perforated lifting plate; the muslin wrap does the same job of getting the fish out intact. Cheesecloth, a length of clean cotton, or a wide strip of foil sling under the fish all work. Lifting boiled cod with a spatula alone usually means serving it in pieces.
- Salt the water properly"Some salt" is unmeasured; a modern poaching guideline of about 1 tablespoon per quart of water is a reasonable reading. Salting the cooking water is generally held to keep the fish's own flavour from leaching into it.
- Scraped horse-radishFresh root, peeled and scraped to a coarse shred, not the bottled creamed kind. The recipe gives no quantity; a couple of inches of root to a gallon of water is enough to scent it. Prepared horseradish in vinegar can stand in, but skip the creamy sauces.
- Drawn butterNot clarified butter in the modern sense. Nineteenth-century drawn butter is a light flour-and-butter sauce thinned with water or fish liquor -- roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon flour, a cup of liquid, whisked smooth. Egg sauce is the same with chopped hard-boiled egg folded in.
- The napkinA folded cloth on the platter absorbs the water that drains from poached fish, so the sauce is not diluted. A doubled paper towel under a fresh linen napkin does it now, and it is worth doing.
- Browning the second-day rolls"Before the fire" means radiant heat from one side. Use the broiler, 4-5 inches from the element, turning once, until the surfaces are speckled brown -- five minutes or so. Note that the recipe forms the rolls from the warmed mixture; a modern cook may find chilling it first makes the rolls easier to shape.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Around 6-8 oz of raw fish per person is a usual modern allowance for the poached dish, and a couple of cups of leftover flaked cod will make a light supper.
Boiled cod with drawn butter and egg sauce appears in The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from the same stock of material that fed the Buckeye and other Midwestern compilations, which reproduces a good deal of Northern and English fish cookery alongside its regional matter. Salt cod and fresh cod were staples of the Atlantic trade, and the pairing with horseradish in the poaching water is an English habit noted in cookery books well before this one. The second half of the entry is the more revealing part: an economical household expected the fish to appear twice, first whole on a napkin as a company dish and again the next day chopped, sauced and browned into rolls. That thrift, rather than any single flavour, is the period signature here.