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Codfish for a Breakfast Dish
For a breakfast dish of codfish and potatoes prepare as for making balls, place alternate layers of the fish and potatoes. Pour milk or cream over the whole and cook in the oven.
This is a shorthand recipe, written for a cook who already knew how to make codfish balls and needed only the variation. The assumptions it leaves out are the ones worth filling in.
- "Prepare as for making balls"That means salt cod, freshened and shredded, combined with mashed potato, plus a little butter, pepper and often a beaten egg; the proportion varies from recipe to recipe, from about equal parts to twice as much potato as fish. Here the mixture is not bound into balls but layered, so keep the fish and potato as two separate preparations rather than mixing them.
- Salt cod is the hingeDried salt cod must be soaked before it is edible: 8 to 24 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, with three or four changes of water. Taste a shred before you commit. Under-soaked cod makes the whole dish inedibly salty, and there is no way to correct it afterward.
- Modern codSalt cod is still sold in Portuguese, Italian and Caribbean groceries as bacalhau or bacalao. Skinless, boneless fillet pieces are the easiest form. Fresh cod is not a substitute — it will not give the cured, savory character the dish depends on, and it releases far more water.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350°F, is right for a milk-bound gratin of this kind; 35 to 45 minutes, until the top is browned and the milk has set around the edges.
- The liquidPour enough milk or cream to come about two-thirds up the layers, not to cover them. Too much and the potato slumps into soup. Cream browns and thickens more reliably than skim milk.
- AssemblyStart and finish with potato; a fish layer on top dries out and toughens. A scattering of butter or fine crumbs over the last potato layer will give a browned surface, which the recipe does not call for.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. A pound of soaked salt cod with about two pounds of potatoes will fill a 9-inch square dish and should serve about six at breakfast.
Salt cod was the everyday protein of the American Northeast long before it was a specialty item, cheap, shelf-stable and available inland year-round, and fish-and-potato mixtures of this kind turn up in nineteenth-century cookbooks under a variety of names. Codfish balls in particular were fixed in the New England breakfast repertoire, fried in deep fat and eaten with baked beans, brown bread or a poached egg. This entry appears to be that mixture rearranged for the oven: the same components, baked in a dish rather than fried in a fat kettle. Its extreme brevity suggests the compiler could assume readers already knew the ball recipe and needed only the two-line variation.