Boiled Cod Fish
Boil the fish forty minutes and when done, carefully remove the skin, then turn the fish over on the dish on which it is to be served, skin side up. Remove the skin from this side. Wipe the dish with a damp cloth, pour a few spoonfuls of the sauce over the fish and the remainder around it; garnish, and serve.
This is the tail end of a longer method: the book assumes a whole cod or a thick cut of one, already lowered into salted water, and only tells you how to finish and dress it. The instructions worth translating are the cooking time and the handling.
- Forty minutes is for a whole fishForty minutes suits a large piece, not fillets -- The recipe never states a size, but forty minutes only makes sense for a whole fish or a thick centre cut. Cod is done when the flesh at the thickest point turns opaque and pulls cleanly from the bone, roughly 8-10 minutes per pound for a whole fish and 6-8 minutes total for a 1-inch fillet.
- Do not actually boil itA rolling boil shreds cod into flakes and drives out moisture; the water should shiver at around 180F and never break the surface. "Boiled" in recipes of this kind often covers gentle poaching rather than a true boil.
- Wrap it before it goes inCod handled twice, once to skin and once to turn, will fall apart unless it is supported. Poach it wrapped in cheesecloth or on a rack or plate that can be lifted out whole, which is how the turning step in this recipe becomes possible at all.
- Season the waterThe recipe does not describe the cooking liquid at all. Salted water, about a tablespoon per quart, is the usual starting point, and a splash of vinegar or lemon juice was commonly added to firm the flesh and keep it white.
- The sauceThe recipe assumes a sauce already made. For boiled cod the usual partner in books of this kind is egg sauce, a drawn-butter or white sauce with chopped hard-boiled egg through it; oyster and parsley sauces were also common. Have it made and hot before the fish leaves the water.
- GarnishThe conventional dressing is parsley sprigs, lemon slices and sieved or quartered hard-boiled egg around the edge of the platter, sometimes with small boiled potatoes.
- Wiping the dishNot fussiness. Poached fish sheds liquid onto the platter, and the sauce will visibly thin if it is poured into a puddle of poaching water.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight. A whole cod of about 4 lb, dressed, will serve four to six as a main course.
Boiled cod belonged to the plain end of the nineteenth-century American table, cheap, abundant off the Atlantic coast, and firmly attached to the Friday meal in Catholic households and to Lent more broadly. The technique here, poaching a whole fish and then skinning it on the serving dish, is often said to derive from English cookery, and it suggests how much American entertaining of the period may have been about presentation: the fish arrives whole, unbroken, masked in a pale sauce and framed with egg and parsley. It is also a reminder of how differently cod was regarded then. Before the collapse of the North Atlantic stocks in the twentieth century, a large whole cod was a household purchase rather than a luxury, which is why a book like this can begin a recipe halfway through and assume the reader has already dealt with a fish of some size.