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Codfish, Whitney
Procure three slices fresh codfish one inch thick. Marinade, boil same as bass and keep warm. Scoop out all you can from three large, peeled raw potatoes with a Parisian potato scoop; boil them in salted water for fifteen minutes and keep till required.
Heat in a small saucepan one tablespoon clarified butter, add one tablespoon flour, mix well with wooden spoon until thoroughly heated; then add one and a half gills broth or hot water. Strain half a gill of the gravy in which the fish was cooked into this pan, thoroughly mix and let boil for five minutes. Season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon cayenne pepper, adding a raw egg yolk and the juice of quarter of a sound lemon. Set the pan at the corner of the range and mix well with a wooden spoon until well thickened, being careful not to let it boil. Strain through a cheesecloth into another saucepan. Drain the potatoes and add them to the sauce. Heat for three minutes, gently mixing meanwhile. Dress the fish on a hot dish; pour the sauce over, arrange twelve small heart-shaped bread croutons around the fish. Sprinkle a very little chopped parsley over, and lastly decorate with six slices broiled bacon, and serve very hot.
A hotel-style poached cod with an egg-thickened velouté and turned potato balls. The sauce is the whole dish, and it will curdle if it boils.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonOnce the egg yolk and lemon juice go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer — roughly 160-175F. "Set the pan at the corner of the range" means pull it off direct heat onto a cool spot; on a modern hob, take it off the burner entirely and stir over residual heat, returning it briefly if it stops thickening.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is 3/4 cup of broth and half a gill is 1/4 cup of the poaching liquid. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: half a teaspoon salt, a quarter teaspoon cayenne. The cayenne is assertive for the roughly one cup of sauce this makes — start with half that if you want the fish to read.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller. Three large potatoes will give you far more balls than the dish needs; the scraps will do for soup or mash.
- Potato timingFifteen minutes will collapse small balls. Boil them 8-10 minutes from cold salted water until just tender, then drain — they get three more minutes in the sauce at the end.
- "Marinade, boil same as bass"A cross-reference to the book's bass entry, which supplies the marinade and cooking liquid; check it before starting. Whatever the marinade, "boil" here means gentle poaching rather than a hard boil. Cod at one inch thick needs about 8-10 minutes at a bare tremble; it flakes the moment it is done and falls apart if pushed.
- Order of operationsStrain the sauce through cheesecloth (or a fine sieve) before the potatoes go in, not after — the straining is there to catch any bits of set yolk and flour lumps.
- Croutons and baconHeart-shaped croutons are bread cut with a small cutter and fried in clarified butter or toasted; they are meant to stay crisp, so set them around the platter at the last moment rather than under the sauce. "Broiled bacon" here is grilled or pan-crisped rashers.
- YieldThree thick slices serve three, or two generously. Scaling up means more broth and yolk in proportion, roughly one yolk per cup of sauce.
This is the naming convention of the grand American hotel and restaurant kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, where a standard preparation was fixed by a garnish and then attached to a name — a patron, a colleague, a public figure — so that "Codfish, Whitney" told a waiter exactly which sauce, which potato cut and which garnish were coming. The formula itself is classical French: a white roux loosened with fish broth and finished with a yolk-and-lemon liaison, which is the sauce the French tradition calls bâtarde or a fish velouté finished at the last minute. What makes it American is the cod and the bacon. Atlantic cod was the cheap, abundant fish of the New England coast, and one might read the dressing of it in a butter-and-yolk sauce with turned potatoes and heart-shaped croutons as a democratic fish given the full continental treatment. Individual dish attributions of this kind are rarely documented, and who the Whitney behind the name was is not known.