Home › The World's Kitchen › Codfish, Shrimp Sauce
Codfish, Shrimp Sauce
Place a five-pound piece fresh codfish in a saucepan with four tablespoons vinegar, just enough water to cover, sliced each carrot and onion, two branches parsley, a sprig thyme, two bay leaves, two cloves, a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover pan and let come to boil as rapidly as possible, then shift to a corner of range, let slowly simmer for forty-five minutes, remove pan to a table and let stand for ten minutes. Carefully lift up fish with two skimmers, dress on a hot dish with folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve with shrimp sauce separately. N. B. The above fish is about double the quantity of the usual dinner fish. The object of this is to show how to utilize left-over fish. It will be used to-morrow for luncheon.
This is a plain court-bouillon poach for a whole centre cut of cod, written for a coal range where the heat is controlled by moving the pan rather than turning a dial. The one thing to change is the timing.
- Cut the cooking time hardCut the cooking time -- Forty-five minutes is far longer than a modern cook would give cod. A rough guide is 10 minutes per inch of thickness at a bare simmer, so the time depends on how thick the piece is; it is done when the flesh at the bone turns opaque and separates in flakes. The ten-minute rest off the heat in the original is sound and worth keeping.
- Never let it boilBringing the pan to a boil "as rapidly as possible" and then dropping it to a corner of the range lets the liquid fall back below boiling. On a modern burner, bring it just to the point of trembling and hold it there; a rolling boil shreds the fish and clouds the broth.
- "Shift to a corner of range"That means the coolest part of a cast-iron range top. Use your lowest gas setting with the pan pulled half off the burner, or 180-190F in a wide pan in a 200F oven.
- The vegetablesThe text is garbled, but it reads as one carrot and one onion, both sliced, along with the parsley, thyme, bay and cloves — a standard court bouillon. Four tablespoons of vinegar is the acid; white wine vinegar or cider vinegar both suit cod.
- Two skimmersFlat perforated skimmers used as a pair to lift the fish without breaking it. Two wide slotted spatulas do the same job, though poaching the piece on a length of cheesecloth and lifting by the ends is easier and safer.
- The folded napkinA period service trick, not decoration alone: the linen absorbs the poaching liquid that drains off so the fish does not sit in a puddle on the platter.
- Shrimp sauceNone is given here; it is presumably to be taken from elsewhere in the book. It is a white or velouté sauce finished with shrimp butter and whole peeled shrimp, and it should be made while the fish poaches.
- Yield and the leftoversThe recipe itself says the piece is about double the usual dinner fish, so roughly half is meant to survive the meal. The chilled remainder is what the author intends for the next day's luncheon.
Poaching a large cut of fish in an acidulated, aromatic broth is the classic French court bouillon, court meaning "short." The closing note is the more revealing part: cooking deliberately for twice the number at table and planning the remainder into the following day's luncheon is a habit of thrift rather than abundance. Cod was a natural fish for it on the Atlantic coast, cheap, firm enough to hold its shape through a long poach, and good cold, which is exactly what a next-day luncheon required.