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Codfish Steaks, Anchovy Butter
Procure three three-quarter-pound fresh codfish steaks, season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, rub on both sides with a tablespoon anchovy essence, then place on a plate and let infuse for an hour, rubbing once in a while. Lift up, spread a little oil all around them, arrange on broiler and broil for six minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, pour anchovy left on plate in a saucepan and add a half ounce butter. Stir with a wooden spoon on fire until melted, pour butter and sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A plain broiled fish supper built on one strong flavouring. The whole thing turns on not overcooking the cod, which the original timing will do if your steaks are thinner than the three-quarter-pound cuts specified.
- The hinge: cook to the flake, not the clockSix minutes a side suits a thick steak cut across a large cod. Most modern cooking guides put cod at the flaking point around 130-135F at the centre, when the flakes just separate under gentle pressure, though food-safety guidance recommends 145F. A modern loin steak an inch thick will be there in three to four minutes a side under a hot broiler.
- Anchovy essenceA Victorian and Edwardian bottled larder staple: salted anchovies cooked down with vinegar and spice into a thin, pourable sauce. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest survivor; loosen a tablespoon of it with a teaspoon of water and a few drops of vinegar to get a rubbable consistency.
- Go easy on the added saltA teaspoon of salt for three steaks, on top of anchovy essence which is itself heavily salted, gives a very saline result by current taste. Half that, or none at all, and season at the table.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon. It is meant to enrich the small amount of seasoned liquid left on the plate, not to make a sauce in any quantity, so keep the pan small or it will simply evaporate.
- The plate juicesThat liquid has sat under raw fish for an hour. Bring it to a proper simmer in the pan for a minute before the butter goes in, rather than just warming it through.
- Broiler position"Arrange on broiler" means the fish goes on bars over or under direct heat, which in 1906 could as easily be a gridiron over coals as a modern overhead broiler. Under an electric or gas broiler, four to five inches from the element, preheated, with the bars oiled as well as the fish so the skin does not weld itself to them.
- YieldThree steaks of three-quarters of a pound each serve three generously, or four if the fish is filleted off the bone before serving.
Alexander Filippini, who worked at Delmonico's in New York as chef and steward, assembled The International Cook Book (1906) as a compendium drawing on the kitchens of Europe and beyond, which is why an unmistakably British-tasting dish sits among its pages. Anchovy essence is the tell: bottled anchovy preparations were a fixture of the nineteenth-century English store cupboard, used the way a cook now reaches for Worcestershire sauce, and they were often paired with cod to lift a lean, mild white fish. Cod itself was still the cheap and inexhaustible workhorse of the North Atlantic in 1906, landed in enormous quantity off New England and the Grand Banks, and a recipe calling casually for three fresh three-quarter-pound steaks assumes an abundance at the fishmonger that no longer holds.