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Fried Codfish, Egg Sauce
Place three one-pound slices fresh codfish in a frying pan. Season with a teaspoon salt and half a light teaspoon pepper, adding half an ounce butter; pour in a half gill white wine and one gill water. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil for five minutes and set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, dress the slices on a hot dish and keep hot. Mix in a saucepan a tablespoon butter and one and a half tablespoons flour; heat for half minute, strain the fish liquor into this pan, lightly mix; add one hard-boiled egg, finely chopped up; mix again. Dilute an egg yolk with two tablespoons cream and add to the pan; continually stir while heating for one minute. Pour sauce over the fish and serve.
The title says fried, but nothing here is fried: the cod is braised in wine and water under a paper lid, then finished in the oven and napped with a velouté enriched with egg. A few conversions and one timing correction are all it needs.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup, and one gill of water is 1/2 cup — barely enough to come up the sides of the steaks, which is the point.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits the dish.
- The timing to ignoreFive minutes at a boil plus twenty in the oven will take cod steaks well past dry. Give them the brief boil, then 8-12 minutes in the oven, depending on thickness; the flesh should just separate. Standard food-safety guidance for fish is 145F, though many cooks pull it lower.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche — parchment cut to the pan's size, buttered side down on the fish. It traps steam without sealing the pan, so the liquor reduces slightly instead of stewing. Parchment works; foil does not, as it seals too well.
- Straining the liquorThere will be roughly 3/4 cup of cooking liquid, which is the whole body of the sauce. Strain it into the roux hot and add it gradually or the flour will seize into lumps.
- The egg liaisonThis is the hinge. Once the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not simmer — hold it below about 180F, stirring, or the yolk scrambles and the sauce goes grainy. Off the heat is safest; the residual warmth is enough to thicken it.
- Cod steaksCross-cut cod steaks are uncommon at counters now; ask the fishmonger to cut them, or use thick loin portions of cod, haddock or pollock. Some Atlantic cod stocks remain depleted, so Pacific cod or haddock may be the better buy.
- YieldThree pounds of fish on the bone serves four to six as a main course, with about a cup of sauce.
Fresh cod cooked in wine and finished with egg sauce sits squarely in the Franco-American hotel cooking written down around the turn of the twentieth century — a veloute built on the fish's own cooking liquor, tightened with a yolk-and-cream liaison, with chopped hard-boiled egg standing in for more expensive garnishes. Egg sauce with boiled or baked cod was also an old English and New England habit. The misleading title is worth noticing: nothing in the method involves frying.