Home › The World's Kitchen › Codfish, Coudert
Codfish, Coudert
Have a piece of fresh codfish one and a half pounds. Cut into thin slices, place on a dish, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one tablespoon Worcestershire sauce; repeatedly turn the slices in the seasoning.
Finely slice three medium, raw, peeled potatoes, plunge them in boiling water for five minutes, drain and keep till required. Heat in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter, add two tablespoons flour, stir well and pour in half pint boiling milk. Season with half teaspoon salt, one tablespoon tomato catsup and one light tablespoon Worcestershire sauce. Mix well while cooking for two minutes, then pour half the quantity of the sauce into a deep baking dish. Place one-third of the codfish as a layer over the sauce, then one third of the potatoes, another third of the codfish, another layer of the potatoes, the other third of codfish and the last of the potatoes, and cover with the balance of the sauce. Sprinkle two tablespoons bread crumbs over the surface, divide half ounce of butter in bits on top. Set in a moderate oven to bake for forty minutes. Remove from the oven and send to the table in the same dish.
A layered cod-and-potato gratin from the Delmonico's tradition, built on a thin béchamel sharpened with catsup and Worcestershire. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the measures and the oven direction need translating.
- Fresh cod, not salt codDespite the heading, this calls for fresh fish. Cut the fillet into slices about a quarter-inch thick; a thick loin piece slices more evenly than a thin tail end. Haddock or pollock behave the same way.
- Saltspoons and gillsSaltspoons -- A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is a half teaspoon across 1.5 lb of fish. That is assertive but not extreme; halve it if your cayenne is fresh and fierce.
- Half pint of milkOne cup, US measure. With 1.5 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour that is a standard medium white sauce; the potatoes will absorb some of it as it runs down between the layers.
- Moderate oven350F. Forty minutes at that temperature will cook thin cod slices through and finish the parboiled potatoes; the fish is done at 145F and the top should be browned.
- The parboiled potatoesFive minutes in boiling water is a blanch, not a cooking. Slice them thin — an eighth of an inch — or they will still be firm when the fish has gone dry.
- Dish sizeA deep dish of roughly 1.5 to 2 quarts gives you the six layers with the sauce reaching the top. Anything wider and the layers will be too shallow to hold together on the spoon.
- Seasoning the fish aheadThe recipe only says to turn the slices repeatedly in the salt, cayenne and Worcestershire; no standing time is specified, so there is no need to let them sit.
- YieldServes four as a main course with bread and something green, or six as part of a larger meal.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it carries dozens of dishes named for the restaurant's regular patrons — a common practice in the grand American and French kitchens of the late nineteenth century, where a standing customer might find a preparation permanently attached to his name. Coudert was a well-known New York family of lawyers of exactly the sort who dined at Delmonico's, and the attribution is generally understood as that kind of compliment rather than a record of who invented the dish. The recipe itself is a plain gratin dressed for the period: tomato catsup and Worcestershire sauce, both bottled and widely stocked by 1900, doing the work that a fish stock or a longer-built sauce would have done in a French kitchen, and reflecting how thoroughly commercial condiments had entered even professional American cooking.