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Boiled Salt Codfish
To boil salt codfish, soak the salt cod over night in lukewarm water, changing the water three times. In the morning plunge the fish in cold water; wrap securely in a piece of linen and boil thirty minutes in boiling hot water with a tablespoonful of vinegar in the water. Serve with drawn butter or egg sauce.
A straightforward preparation of dried salt cod, the one dish in this chapter where the soaking matters more than the cooking. Modern salt cod is often cut thinner and cured more lightly than the plank-hard 1900 article, so both stages shorten.
- Soaking is the hingeLukewarm water with three changes overnight is the whole recipe. Taste a corner of the raw flesh before cooking: if it is still aggressively salty, keep soaking in cold water and change it again. Thick center-cut pieces from a traditional fishmonger may want 24 to 36 hours in the refrigerator; supermarket vacuum-packed salt cod often needs only 12.
- Cold-water plungeThe morning plunge into cold water rinses off the last of the surface brine, and is often said to firm the flesh. Do it, then pat dry.
- Wrap securely in linenA double layer of cheesecloth tied at both ends does the same job, and keeps the flakes from breaking up in the pot. Leave the parcel loose enough that water circulates.
- Thirty minutes is too longThat timing suits a dense, fully hardened cure. Rehydrated modern salt cod is done in 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer for a thick piece, less for thin. A hard boil shreds it and squeezes out moisture; hold the water just below a rolling boil.
- The vinegarA tablespoon of vinegar per pot brightens the flesh and helps it stay white. Cider or white wine vinegar both work; it does not season the fish noticeably.
- Drawn butterIn American cookbooks of this period drawn butter usually meant a simple flour-thickened butter sauce, not the clarified butter served with lobster today. Egg sauce was generally the same base with chopped hard-boiled egg stirred through.
- YieldSalt cod loses weight in the cure and regains it in the soak; the recipe gives no quantity, but reckon about 1/3 lb of dry fish per person, so a pound will serve three.
Salt cod was one of the great commodities of the North Atlantic, and by the nineteenth century it was a New England staple common enough that cookbooks could take it for granted. Dried and salted, it needed no ice and traveled anywhere, which made it a standard fish of inland towns and of Fridays and Lent in Catholic households. Boiling it wrapped in linen would have helped hold the flakes together so the piece came to table intact. Drawn butter and egg sauce, both flour-thickened, were common accompaniments to boiled fish in American cookery of this era, following English practice.