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Codfish, Canadian Style
Procure three three-quarter-pound codfish steaks, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Heat in a frying pan two tablespoons melted butter, adding one finely minced onion and the steaks. Gently fry for ten minutes on each side, remove and dress on a dish. Sprinkle two tablespoons flour in the frying pan, mix well, add a half gill each white wine and water, half teaspoon fresh chopped parsley and the juice of half a lemon. Mix well and let boil for five minutes, pour over the fish and serve.
A straightforward pan-fried fish with a white wine pan sauce; the only real problem is the cooking time, which belongs to an era that liked cod cooked to the point of collapse.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill each of wine and water is 1/4 cup each, half a cup of liquid in total. That is a thin sauce for two tablespoons of flour, so expect to loosen it with more water or a little fish stock.
- Cut the frying timeTen minutes a side will leave cod dry and stringy. A cod steak an inch thick needs roughly 4 minutes on the first side and 3 on the second, until it just flakes. Cooks who want to follow official guidance should take it to 145F at the bone; many kitchens pull cod earlier, around 130-135F, for a moister result.
- Cod steaksThese are cross-cut steaks on the bone, not fillets, and many fish counters no longer cut them; ask, or use thick loin pieces of about 3/4 lb each and reduce the time by a minute a side.
- The onionMinced onion in butter for twenty minutes over frying heat will scorch and turn the sauce bitter. Keep the heat at medium, and if the onion is colouring too fast, push it to the edge of the pan under the fish.
- Making the sauceThere is only about two tablespoons of butter in the pan for two tablespoons of flour, which gives a stiff paste. Add the liquid gradually and whisk hard, or the sauce will be lumpy; five minutes at a simmer is enough to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Lemon lastThe juice is listed with the liquids, but acid held at a boil dulls quickly. Add it off the heat, after the sauce has thickened, and taste before salting again.
- YieldThree steaks of 3/4 lb each on the bone serve three generously, or four if you are cutting the steaks in half after cooking.
Filippini's The International Cook Book belongs to a genre of encyclopaedic turn-of-the-century compilations that sorted thousands of short recipes under national labels, and the labels were often loose. Cod from the Grand Banks and the Gulf of St Lawrence was the great export staple of Atlantic Canada and Newfoundland for centuries, mostly salted and dried. The sauce, meanwhile, is pure French kitchen: fat and flour cooked together in the pan, moistened with white wine and water, finished with parsley and lemon -- a small pan sauce built from the fond of the fish, which is exactly how a Delmonico's-trained chef would have handled almost any fried fish, whatever flag the recipe flew.