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Fresh Codfish Tongues, Poulette
Place one and a half pounds fresh codfish tongues in frying pan with half gill white wine, one gill water, half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt and saltspoon cayenne pepper. Lightly mix, then cover with a sheet of buttered paper and boil for five minutes. Set in the oven for ten minutes. Heat half teaspoon butter in a saucepan, add six finely chopped shallots and lightly brown for three minutes, adding two tablespoons of flour. Stir well while heating for one minute, then strain liquor of the tongues into this pan, adding half gill hot milk and half teaspoon finely chopped olives; lightly mix and cook for five minutes, then pour sauce into the pan with the tongues. Mix a little and let cook for five minutes. Mix on a plate one egg yolk with half gill cream and a tablespoon sherry and add to the tongues; carefully stir while heating for one minute, pour into a deep, hot dish and serve.
A French-style poulette — a white sauce finished with egg yolk and cream — applied to a cut most American markets no longer stock. The measurements are Edwardian and the cooking times are cumulative, so read the whole method before starting.
- The hinge: never boil after the liaisonOnce the egg yolk, cream and sherry go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer. One minute of gentle heat off the boil is right; a bubble curdles the yolk and the sauce breaks into grains.
- Gills and saltspoonsIn American cookbooks of this period a gill is reckoned at 4 fl oz, so half a gill is 1/4 cup and a gill 1/2 cup (a British imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so scale up slightly if you follow that reading). A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon — with cayenne, that is a real amount of heat for 1 1/2 lb of fish.
- Cod tonguesThese are the gelatinous muscle from under the jaw, not tongues in any real sense. They are a Newfoundland and Atlantic Canadian staple and turn up frozen at good fishmongers; scallops or monkfish cheeks behave similarly under this sauce, though the texture is firmer.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven (around 350F) will serve for the ten-minute stage, which is really about holding the tongues hot while they finish in their own liquor.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the pan's diameter and buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist without sealing the pan the way a lid does. Use parchment rather than foil, which does not butter or crimp as well.
- The butter for the rouxHalf a teaspoon of butter will not carry six chopped shallots or absorb two tablespoons of flour. Half an ounce (one tablespoon) is the workable quantity, and the flour should be cooked without colouring past pale blond.
- Half a teaspoon of olivesNot a typo, just a period flourish — a whisper of chopped green olive for salt and sharpness rather than a visible ingredient. Taste for salt afterwards, since the fish has already been salted.
- Total cooking timeFive minutes boiling, ten in the oven, five minutes for the sauce on its own, then a further five with the tongues in it and a final minute after the liaison. Cod tongues are gelatinous and tolerate this better than a fillet would, but if you are substituting a lean white fish, poach it briefly and add it to the finished sauce at the end.
- YieldA pound and a half serves three as a main course or four as a first course. Serve in the deep dish specified, with plain boiled potatoes or rice to take the sauce.
Poulette is one of the classic offshoots of French velouté: a white sauce sharpened with shallots and finished with a liaison of egg yolk and cream, traditionally served with mussels, tripe, sweetbreads and other pale, soft things. The name means "young hen," and is generally traced to the sauce's pale colour and its original chicken-stock base rather than to any dish containing poultry. What makes this version notable is the pairing with cod tongues — a thrifty offcut long prized in Newfoundland and along the Atlantic coast, where by local tradition children are said to have earned pocket money cutting tongues from the day's catch on the wharf. Setting a humble byproduct in a full French sauce is characteristic of this book's era of hotel and restaurant cookery, when a kitchen's skill was measured by what it could do with the parts other cooks discarded.