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Picked-Up Codfish in Cream
Neatly shred a pound of boneless codfish, and plunge into a quart of boiling water for five minutes. Thoroughly drain on a sieve, carefully press the cod with a spoon, so as to get it as dry as possible. Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons of melted butter with one and a half tablespoons of flour; pour in one gill of hot milk and one gill of cream. Season with two saltspoons of white pepper and a saltspoon of grated nutmeg. Lightly mix until it comes to a boil, then add the codfish; lightly mix, cook for five minutes longer, lightly mixing once in a while, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A plain cream sauce built on salt cod, from the era when "boneless codfish" meant the boxed, bone-picked dried salt fish sold by the pound rather than fresh fillet. Almost everything that can go wrong here is a salt problem.
- The hinge: desaltingFive minutes in boiling water was enough for the lightly cured, shredded cod sold in wooden boxes a century ago. Salt cod on sale now is usually harder and saltier: soak it in several changes of cold water for 12 to 24 hours in the refrigerator, then taste a shred before you proceed. If it is still aggressively salty, the finished sauce cannot be rescued.
- "Boneless codfish"This is dried salt cod (bacalao, baccalà), not fresh. Fresh cod will fall to mush under this treatment and the dish will taste of nothing. Look for thick centre-cut pieces rather than the thin tail ends, which are mostly skin and salt.
- A gillHalf a cup, so a cup of liquid in total — half milk, half cream, for a pound of fish.
- A saltspoonAbout a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of white pepper is a half teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for salt cod, and the nutmeg quarter-teaspoon is not optional — it is doing the work salt usually does.
- No added saltThe recipe never calls for any, and you should not add any until the dish is finished and tasted. Season the plate, not the pan.
- The butter and flourOne and a half tablespoons of each makes a light roux. Cook it a minute over low heat before the liquid goes in so the flour loses its raw taste, and add the hot milk and cream gradually to avoid lumps.
- "Lightly mixing"Repeated three times. Stir hard and the shreds break down into a grainy paste; the dish is meant to keep visible flakes of fish in the sauce.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a pound of fish in a cup of sauce will serve about four. It wants buttered toast, split baking-powder biscuits, or boiled potatoes underneath, and a hard-boiled egg or chopped parsley over the top if you want it to look like more than it is.
"Picked up" is New England kitchen shorthand for salt cod pulled apart into shreds by hand rather than cut. Dried salt cod was the backbone of the North Atlantic trade for centuries, shipped from Newfoundland and Massachusetts to Europe and the Caribbean, and it remained a cheap Friday and breakfast staple in American households long after refrigeration made fresh fish available inland. Creamed codfish on toast turns up in many American cookbooks of the period; that this one appears in a volume called The International Cook Book, filed under "The World's Kitchen," says something about how thoroughly the dish had been naturalised by the time that book appeared in 1906. The dressing-up here — cream as well as milk, white pepper, nutmeg — is the hotel-kitchen touch, the sort of seasoning a French-trained chef would bring to a béchamel.