Katy's Codfish
Soak pieces of codfish several hours in cold water, or wash thoroughly, heat in oven and pick fine, and place in skillet with cold water; boil a few minutes, pour off water and add fresh, boil again (if not very salt the second boiling is not necessary), and drain off as before; then add plenty of sweet milk, a good-sized piece of butter, and a thickening made of a little flour (or corn starch) mixed. with cold milk until smooth like cream. Stir well, and just before taking from the fire drop in an egg, stir very briskly, and serve. - Mrs. Helen M. Stevenson.
A creamed salt cod, the standby of any household that kept dried fish in the pantry. The whole dish turns on getting the salt down to a seasoning level without cooking the fish to threads.
- Salt cod todayHard, bone-dry salt cod of the kind sold in wooden boxes wants a long soak in cold water; the recipe says several hours, and in practice 8 to 12, changed two or three times, is usual. The softer vacuum-packed salt cod now common in supermarkets is generally less heavily cured and may need only a few hours, so taste a shred before you commit to two boilings.
- "Heat in oven and pick fine"The alternative given for unsoaked fish: a short spell in a low oven makes the stiff sheets brittle enough to shred by hand along the grain. The book gives no temperature. This handles breaking the fish up, not desalting — the boilings that follow do that.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that a nineteenth-century kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk gives the right body; skim will taste thin.
- Proportions, since none are givenFor roughly a half pound of soaked, picked cod, figure 2 cups milk, 2 tablespoons butter, and 2 tablespoons flour slaked in a little cold milk. Cornstarch, offered as the alternative, needs about half as much.
- Boil a few minutes, no moreSalt cod that simmers hard for a quarter hour goes stringy and cottony. Bring it barely to a boil, drain, and repeat only if the second taste is still aggressively salty.
- The egg is the hingeDropped in at the very end and stirred briskly, the egg thickens and enriches without setting into shreds. Pull the pan from the heat as you add it and keep stirring; if the sauce boils afterward the egg curdles and the dish is grainy.
- Season at the endAdd no salt until the sauce is finished. Black pepper is a common finish for creamed codfish, though this recipe calls for none.
- ServingQuantities as above make two to three servings. Creamed codfish of this era went over buttered toast, split biscuits, or boiled potatoes, most often at breakfast.
Salt cod was the great preserved protein of nineteenth-century America — cheap, shelf-stable, and shipped inland from the New England fisheries by the boxcar — which is why a Southern collection like The Dixie Cook Book carries several dried-fish dishes far from any cod ground. Creamed codfish on toast, or "codfish gravy," was a common breakfast dish, and versions of it appear in community cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s. The naming here is typical of subscription cookbooks assembled from contributors: recipes arrived under a household name, and who Katy was the book does not say. The two-water boiling reflects a real problem of the period, since the salt content of cured fish varied wildly from barrel to barrel and no cook could trust a fixed soaking time.