Codfish Balls
1 egg 1 tablespoon butter teaspoon pepper Wash fish in cold water and pull into small pieces, keeping fish in water while doing so. Wash and pare the potatoes and cut into pieces before measuring. Cook the fish and potatoes together in boiling water until the potatoes are tender, then drain and shake over the fire until dry ; mash, and beat thoroughly with a wire potato masher. Add the butter, pepper and salt if needed. Cool slightly, then add beaten egg, and beat until light. Take up mixture in a spoon, molding slightly with a knife, and drop into deep hot fat. Fry until brown, about 1 minute. Drain on absorbent paper. Mixture for codfish balls may be served hot, without frying, or turned into a buttered baking dish and browned in the oven and served as a baked dish, or shaped into flat cakes and sauted in frying pan. To make codfish puff, prepare in same manner, only use two well-beaten eggs. Cook like an omelet.
A standard New England salt-cod recipe from an era when every pantry held a wooden box of dried fish. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete — only the egg, butter and pepper survive — so the working proportions have to be reconstructed from the method.
- The missing quantitiesPeriod versions of this method commonly run somewhere around 1 cup shredded salt cod to 2 or 2½ cups raw pared potato, cut up before measuring, with the egg, tablespoon of butter and pepper as listed. The original's figures for fish and potato did not make it onto the page, so treat any amount you use as your own judgment rather than the book's.
- Buy the right fishThis wants hard salt cod, dried and heavily salted, not fresh cod. Salt cod now comes in wooden boxes or vacuum packs; the boneless loin pieces are easiest to shred.
- Soaking, which the recipe assumesSoaking, which the recipe does not spell out -- Older salt cod was usually freshened overnight, and this recipe assumes fish already fit to cook; it says only to wash it and keep it in water while pulling it apart. With modern packs, soak 4 to 8 hours in several changes of cold water, then taste a shred before deciding on salt. The direction to add "salt if needed" is the whole point.
- The hinge: dry the mashShaking the drained pan over the heat until the mixture stops steaming is what keeps the balls from bursting in the fat. A wet mash absorbs grease and falls apart. Mash while hot, and beat only until light — overworked potato turns gluey.
- Deep fat temperatureThe book gives no temperature. Period manuals tested fat for cooked mixtures like this by browning a bread cube in about forty seconds, which corresponds roughly to 375F on a modern thermometer. The recipe's one minute suits fat at about that heat; cooler fat gives you a greasy, spreading ball.
- ShapingTwo spoons, or a spoon and a knife as written, give the traditional rough oval. Chilling the mixture an hour first makes it far easier to handle and reduces spatter.
- The variationsThe recipe says only to brown the baked version in the oven; a moderate oven, around 350F, until browned on top will do it, roughly 25 to 30 minutes. The sauteed flat cakes take about four minutes a side in butter. The "codfish puff" with two eggs is cooked like an omelet, as the text says — closer to a soft scramble than a fritter, so keep the heat gentle.
- YieldUsing proportions like those suggested above, expect about a dozen balls, enough for three or four as a main course. Egg sauce and stewed tomatoes are accompaniments often met with in period cookery, though this recipe suggests none.
Salt cod was one of the founding commodities of New England commerce, and codfish balls are what the domestic end of that trade looked like on a plate: cheap preserved protein stretched with potato and fried. They were traditionally a Sunday breakfast dish in Boston households, eaten with baked beans and brown bread left from Saturday night, though the association is folkloric as much as documented. The recipe says something about who it was written for: a household cook expected to make a filling meal from a box of dried fish and a few potatoes, and given four ways to serve it so the same mixture need not appear the same way twice.