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Creamed Codfish
Creamed codfish on toast makes a dainty dish. Put the fish in cold water on the back of the range; keep warm, but do not allow it to boil until the fish is softened. Pick up, remove skin and bone, and put in a saucepan with rich milk, allowing a pint of rich milk to a large coffee cupful of fish. When it comes to the boiling point thicken with a teaspoonful of flour dissolved in a half cupful of cold cream. Just before taking from the range, stir in butter the size of an egg and one well-beaten egg. Season with pepper, pour on hot buttered toast and grate the yolk of a hard boiled egg over it for a garnish.
A salt-cod cream sauce, built on a technique that only works if the fish is freshened slowly and the egg is added off the heat. Both of those are easy to get wrong.
- The fish is salt cod"Codfish" in a book of this vintage means dried salt cod, not a fresh fillet. Soak it in several changes of cold water for 8 to 24 hours depending on how hard and heavily salted the piece is; the recipe's warm-water method on the cool end of the range is a shortcut for lightly cured fish.
- "Back of the range"The coolest part of a wood or coal range, used for holding things below a simmer. On a modern hob this is the lowest setting, or a pan of water held around 160-170F. Boiling salt cod at this stage toughens the flakes.
- A large coffee cupfulRoughly a cup, though coffee-cup measures of the period varied and were often reckoned smaller. Take it as about 1 cup of picked, flaked fish to 1 pint of milk, and adjust the flour if your fish measures generously.
- "Rich milk" and creamWhole milk, or whole milk with a splash of cream. The half cupful of cold cream that carries the flour is additional liquid, so the finished sauce is looser than a standard white sauce; a teaspoon of flour to roughly a pint and a quarter of dairy gives barely more than a light nap.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- The egg is the hingeThe recipe adds it, with the butter, just before the pan leaves the range. Safer to pull the pan off first and temper the beaten egg with a ladle of the hot sauce before stirring it in. Added straight into a boiling pan it scrambles and the sauce turns grainy; residual heat is enough to thicken it.
- Season with pepper onlyThe instruction is deliberate. Salt cod carries its own salt even after soaking; taste before you add any, and expect to add none.
- YieldServes four over toast as a light supper or breakfast dish, two if it is the whole meal.
Salt cod was one of the great staples of the North Atlantic trade, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was a cheap, shelf-stable pantry item in many American households, shipped inland in wooden boxes as stiff planks or, later, in shredded form. Creamed codfish on toast belongs to a large family of late-Victorian and Edwardian "on toast" dishes -- creamed chipped beef, creamed eggs, creamed chicken -- that turned a preserved protein and a milk sauce into breakfast or a light supper. The hard-boiled yolk grated over the top is a garnish that French cookery came to call mimosa.