Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Codfish Balls
Codfish Balls
Mrs. Banks.
Take four cups of mashed potatoes, three cups of boiled codfish, minced fine, add butter: mix well together; then add two well beaten eggs, beating it up again thoroughly; drop by spoonsful into hot lard and fry the same as doughnuts. Are nice fried in croquette baskets.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know two things it never says: that the fish is salt cod, and that the frying fat should be hot enough to set the outside instantly. Get those right and the rest follows.
- The fish is almost certainly salt codThe fish is probably salt cod -- in this period "boiled codfish" in an everyday recipe usually meant dried salt cod, soaked in several changes of cold water (overnight is the usual instruction) and then simmered gently until it flakes, though the recipe itself does not say. If you use fresh cod instead, poach it and salt the mixture properly, since all the seasoning in this dish otherwise comes from the fish.
- Fat temperature"Fry the same as doughnuts" gives no number; the usual modern range for frying doughnuts, around 365-375F, is a reasonable stand-in. Cooler than that and the potato mixture drinks lard and slumps; hotter and the outside colors before the egg has set. Lard is still the right fat for flavor, but any neutral high-smoke-point oil works.
- Butter is unmeasuredThe original just says "add butter." For four cups of potato, 2 to 3 tablespoons is a workable amount. More than that makes the mixture too loose to hold its shape in the fat.
- Keep the potato coarseMash the potatoes while hot but do not whip or process them. Overworked potato turns gluey and the balls come out dense. Mixing the beaten egg into a mixture that has cooled to warm, not hot, also keeps it from thinning.
- Chill before fryingThe recipe drops the mixture straight from the spoon, which works if the mixture is cold and stiff. Twenty to thirty minutes in the refrigerator makes the difference between round balls and flat cakes.
- Croquette basketsThese appear to have been small hinged wire frying baskets used to shape the mixture as it fried; the recipe says nothing further about them. Nothing modern reproduces the shape exactly; a small ice cream scoop and an ordinary frying basket will fry them evenly, without the shaping.
- YieldOver seven cups of mixture is a large batch; at walnut size it will run well past fifty balls, enough for a dozen people, so consider halving it. Drain on paper and serve at once, since they soften as they sit.
Salt cod balls were a fixture of New England breakfast tables well into the twentieth century, tied to the Atlantic dried-fish trade that made cod a cheap, shelf-stable protein anywhere a barrel could be shipped. The pairing with potato is practical rather than clever: both were kitchen leftovers, and the dish is essentially a way of using yesterday's mashed potato and the tail end of a piece of soaked cod. The convention of eating them on Sunday morning is often linked to the ban on cooking that observant households kept, with the soaking and boiling done Saturday, though that association is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance here, credited to Mrs. Banks, reflects how The Home Cook Book was assembled: contributed recipes from named local women, printed largely as they were handed in, with all the shorthand and unstated measurements that implies.