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Codfish Balls
3 cups hot, mashed potato 1 teaspoon onion juice 1 tablespoon minced parsley (optional) 1 cup shredded codfish 1 egg Salt and pepper to taste Fine dry crumbs Mazola White or Spanish sauce Scald the codfish and drain thoroughly. Then beat into the potato with the seasonings and the egg yolk. Cool, form into balls, roll in fine dry crumbs, then in the egg white slightly beaten and diluted with one-third cup milk. Roll again in fine dry crumbs, place in a frying basket and fry in deep fat, using enough Mazola to half fill the kettle. It should be hot enough to brown a bit of bread in forty counts, 375 degrees F. Drain on crumpled paper and serve with the sauce.
Karo served with Crumb Griddle Cakes
A standard New England salt-cod breakfast dish, here written for a corn-oil advertiser's booklet. The recipe assumes you know what "shredded codfish" means and that one scalding will handle it, which is not always true.
- The codfish is salt cod"Shredded codfish" meant the boneless salt cod sold loose or in wooden boxes, already torn into flakes. Modern salt cod is usually sold as stiff planks and needs longer soaking than a single scald; taste the fish before it goes into the potato, and repeat the scald or soak in cold water if it is still aggressively salty. Salt the mixture only after tasting.
- MazolaCorn oil, then a relatively new product and the reason this booklet exists. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works for the frying, and the amount called for is a genuine half-kettle of it.
- Frying temperature375F is given outright, so use a thermometer and ignore the bread test. "Brown a bit of bread in forty counts" means roughly forty seconds of steady counting, an unreliable method that survives here from older books.
- Keep the potato dryThe hinge of the dish. Mashed potato made with milk or much butter will slacken as it cools and the balls will burst in the fat. Use potato mashed dry and still hot so it absorbs the fish, then chill the mixture thoroughly before shaping.
- The double coatingCrumbs, then egg white thinned with a third cup of milk, then crumbs again. Let the coated balls rest fifteen minutes in the refrigerator before frying so the crust sets; otherwise it sloughs off in the oil.
- White or Spanish sauceWhite sauce is a plain milk bechamel. Spanish sauce in American cookbooks of this period is a tomato sauce with onion, green pepper and sometimes mushroom, closer to a creole sauce than to the French espagnole.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Three cups of potato with a cup of fish makes about four cups of mixture; the number of balls depends entirely on how large they are formed.
- The last line"Karo served with Crumb Griddle Cakes" is a stray caption picked up from elsewhere in the original booklet, not part of this recipe.
Salt cod was the cheap, shelf-stable protein of the American Northeast for two centuries, a byproduct of the Grand Banks fishery that fed both the domestic table and the West Indies trade, and codfish balls were its standard Sunday-morning form in New England households well before this booklet was printed. By the early twentieth century the labor had largely gone out of it: manufacturers sold cod already boned and shredded in boxes, which is what the ingredient list assumes. The booklet itself is a corn-products promotional publication, which explains why the frying medium is named as a brand and why an unrelated line about Karo syrup has drifted into the text; such pamphlets were given away by the makers of Mazola and Karo to establish new industrial products inside recipes cooks already knew by heart.