Home › The World's Kitchen › Codfish Hollandaise
Codfish Hollandaise
Remove bones from a three-pound piece of very fresh codfish. Place in a lightly buttered baking dish, cut two peeled, raw potatoes into olive shapes, arrange around the fish; season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Sprinkle four sound, finely chopped shallots over the fish, pour half gill white wine around. Set in the oven to bake for forty minutes. Remove, sprinkle over a half teaspoon chopped parsley and serve.
A plain baked fish with wine and shallots, written for a cook who already knew what temperature to use and how long potatoes take. Two things need attention: the oven, which is never named, and the potatoes, which will not cook in the same time as the fish.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup — barely enough to film the bottom of the dish. That is intentional; this is not a poach but a moist bake.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a piece of fish this size, 400F is right; the dish is meant to bake rather than steam, and a slow oven will leave the wine sitting in the bottom.
- The potatoes are the problemForty minutes is a potato timing, not a fish timing. Raw potato in olive shapes needs roughly that long, while a 3 lb cod loin is done in 20-25 minutes at 400F. Parboil the shaped potatoes for 8-10 minutes first, then arrange them around the fish and bake everything together for about 25 minutes.
- Olive shapesThis is the cut now called tourné — a seven-sided barrel about the size of a large olive, pared with a small knife. Any evenly sized small piece works; the point is that they all cook at the same rate.
- DonenessCod is often taken from the oven at 130-135F at the thickest point, when the flakes just separate under a fork, though official food-safety guidance for fish is 145F. Cooked the full forty minutes as written it will be dry and stringy.
- "Sound" shallotsSimply firm and unblemished, with no soft or sprouting spots.
- Where is the hollandaiseThere is none in the method. In classical French menu usage a la hollandaise on a fish dish generally indicated plain boiled potatoes with butter or an egg-and-butter sauce, so if you want sauce hollandaise, make it separately and spoon it over at the table.
- YieldServes four generously as a main course. Butter paper or a loose sheet of foil over the dish for the first half of the baking keeps the top from drying, then uncover to finish.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), one of a run of encyclopaedic American volumes written by hotel and restaurant men — Filippini spent years at Delmonico's in New York — that aimed to give a household cook a name and a method for every dish a professional kitchen might send out. The title is a piece of that menu language rather than a description: in classical French usage a la hollandaise attached to fish meant, most often, fish served simply with plain boiled potatoes and butter or an egg-and-butter sauce, a formula usually traced to the Dutch and North Sea habit of eating boiled fish with little more than potatoes alongside. Cod was the obvious carrier for it in an American book, being cheap, abundant on the Atlantic coast and sold both fresh and salted; Filippini's insistence on "very fresh" is the useful part of the instruction.