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For a Breakfast Dish
Poached eggs on toast, with a garnishing of codfish balls, one on a corner of each slice, and bacon. The bacon is best fried in the melted fat. The fat will not retain the flavor of the various articles cooked in it, especially if pieces of uncooked potatoes are put in to it after each frying.
This is an assembly note rather than a measured recipe: three cooked components brought together on one plate, plus a bit of practical advice about the frying fat. The order in which you cook them is the only real difficulty.
- No quantities are givenCount on one slice of toast, one poached egg, one codfish ball and one or two rashers of bacon per person. Everything else is a matter of appetite.
- Work backwards from the eggsPoached eggs will not wait. Fry the bacon first, hold it warm, shape and fry the codfish balls in the same fat, toast the bread, and poach the eggs last, timing them for three minutes so the yolk is still soft.
- Codfish ballsThese are the salt-cod-and-mashed-potato cakes found elsewhere in books of this period, not a modern fish cake. Salt cod needs soaking overnight with two or three changes of water before it goes anywhere near a pan; if you are buying prepared cod cakes instead, skip the soaking.
- "The melted fat"The recipe fries the bacon in fat that is already in the pan, i.e. kept drippings or the fat the codfish balls were cooked in, rather than fat rendered from this bacon. If your bacon is lean and the pan is dry, a spoonful of extra fat may be needed.
- The potato trickDropping raw potato into used fat to draw off strong flavours is advice found in a number of nineteenth-century household manuals. Whatever the mechanism, it helps at best partially: fat that has cooked salt cod will still taste of salt cod, and fat used repeatedly should be discarded once it darkens or smells sharp.
- Straining and storingStrain the fat through a fine sieve while it is still liquid to remove crumbs, which are what turn it rancid fastest, and keep it covered in the refrigerator rather than on the stove shelf as the original household would have done.
- PoachingA shallow pan of barely simmering water with a spoonful of vinegar holds the whites together. Lift the eggs out with a slotted spoon and blot them on a cloth or the toast will go slack.
American breakfast writing is full of pages like this one: not recipes so much as instructions for combining things the cook already knew how to make. Salt cod was the cheap, keeping protein of the northeastern kitchen, and codfish balls at breakfast were so ordinary in New England that they needed no introduction. The advice about the frying fat belongs to the same economy: fat was bought dear or rendered at home, kept in a crock by the stove and used until it could be used no more, and the raw-potato remedy for tainted grease is often said to have circulated in household manuals as received wisdom rather than tested science.