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January 14
Menu: Cream of Cheese Soup; Celery; Codfish Balls; Baked Potatoes; Olives; Baked Macaroni and Peas; Spinach Salad; Cheese Relish Fig Pudding; Coffee Codfish Balls-2 cupfuls mashed potatoes, 1/2 cupfuls shredded codfish, 1 egg, 1 tablespoonful Crisco, melted, Put codfish 1 teaspoonful pepper. in wire strainer, let cold water run through and squeeze dry. Mix the hot, unseasoned potatoes with codfish. To this add the melted Crisco, beaten egg and pepper. Beat well. Shape in balls and fry in deep Crisco until a golden brown color.
The text has been mangled in printing — the pepper measure has migrated into the middle of a sentence, and the final step, frying the balls in deep Crisco, has dropped off entirely. What survives is a straightforward salt-cod and potato mixture.
- The missing stepAs printed the recipe stops at "Beat well." Codfish balls of this period were normally shaped into small balls or rough spoonfuls and fried in deep fat until browned, a couple of minutes, then drained on paper; the printed text gives no temperature or time.
- CriscoStill sold, and still an all-vegetable shortening, though reformulated to remove partially hydrogenated oil. In the tablespoonful mixed into the potato, butter works as well; for the frying fat any neutral oil with a high smoke point will do.
- Shredded codfishThis means salt cod sold pre-shredded in a wooden box, which was a staple grocery item in 1913. Today buy a piece of dry salt cod and shred it yourself, or use bacalhau from a Latin or Portuguese market.
- The rinsing is not enoughRunning cold water through a strainer freshens only the boxed, already partly desalted product. Whole modern salt cod needs soaking for 12 to 24 hours with several changes of water before it is anywhere near edible.
- Ambiguous quantity"1/2 cupfuls shredded codfish" is garbled. It may stand for half a cup, or for 1 1/2 cupfuls with the leading figure lost; the text as printed cannot settle it.
- That teaspoon of pepperA full teaspoon of pepper to two cups of potato is aggressive by modern taste, and the recipe gives no salt at all because the fish supplies it. Season the mixture to taste after the fish is in.
- Hot, unseasoned potatoesThe recipe specifies hot potato and gives no reason for it; working the mixture while hot helps the egg and fat blend in. Mix and fry without letting it sit long.
- YieldAbout a dozen small balls, enough for three or four people as a breakfast or supper dish.
Salt cod balls belong to New England breakfast more than to any dinner table, and their presence in a Crisco recipe shows how thoroughly Procter & Gamble's 1911 shortening was being pushed as a replacement for lard in every corner of the American kitchen — here as the fat beaten into the potato. Dried salted cod was the currency of the North Atlantic fisheries and kept for long periods without ice, which is why it appears constantly in nineteenth-century household cookery far inland. The pairing with potato is generally traced to Yankee thrift with leftovers rather than to any single invented dish, and the same mixture turns up as bolinhos de bacalhau in Portugal and as accra in the Caribbean, wherever the salt cod trade reached.