Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Boiled Codfish-Salt
Boiled Codfish-Salt
Soak two pounds of codfish in lukewarm water over night or for several hours; change the water several times; about one hour before dinner put this into cold fresh water, and set over the fire; let it come to a boil, or just simmer, for fiften minutes but not to boil hard, then take out of the water, drain and serve with egg sauce, or with cold boiled eggs sliced and laid over it, with a drawn butter or cream gravy poured over all.
A plain nineteenth-century Friday dinner that still works, provided you treat the salt cod gently and take the soaking seriously.
- The hinge: never let it boil hardHard boiling makes salt cod stringy and drives the flakes apart. Bring the water barely to a shiver and hold it there; the fish is done when it flakes at the thickest point, which for most modern fillets is 8-12 minutes rather than a full fifteen.
- What kind of cod to buyThis assumes bone-in, heavily salted, board-stiff dried cod. The lightly salted fillets sold vacuum-packed today need far less soaking - four to six hours with two or three water changes is usually enough. Taste a corner of the raw fish after soaking; it should be pleasantly saline, not aggressively salty.
- Soaking waterLukewarm water speeds the process but also warms the fish into the range where bacteria multiply. Soak in the refrigerator instead, and change the water three or four times over the night.
- Cold fresh water to startThe recipe puts the soaked fish into cold water and brings it up slowly rather than dropping it into boiling water; a gentle rise is generally held to keep the flakes intact. Add no salt to the poaching water.
- Egg sauceThe period's egg sauce is a drawn butter or thin white sauce with chopped hard-boiled egg stirred through. "Drawn butter" is butter melted with a little flour and hot water, essentially a loose blond roux sauce - not simply melted butter.
- YieldTwo pounds of dried salt cod rehydrates considerably and serves four to six as a main course, with boiled potatoes and beets in the New England manner.
Salt cod was the backbone of the North Atlantic trade for three centuries: dried on racks in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, it kept for months without ice and travelled anywhere, which is why it turns up in inland American cookbooks as readily as coastal ones. Recipes like this one appear in many household manuals of the 1870s and 1880s, usually under boiled or "picked up" fish, and they are often said to reflect two pressures at once - the meatless Friday observed in some Christian traditions, and the simple fact that a hard slab of cod was among the cheapest protein a family could keep in the pantry. The Home Cook Book (1874), compiled from contributions by ladies of Chicago and other cities, was one of the earliest American charity cookbooks, and its salt fish entries are notably terse: the writers assumed every reader already knew what a dried cod looked like and needed only to be told how long to let it stand in the water.