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Salt Codfish with Eggs
Take a pint bowlful of shredded fish, place it in a pan, cover with water and set on the back of the stove. When the fish is fresh enough, drain off the water and melt a piece of butter the size of an egg with the fish, stirring in a tablespoonful of flour and letting the mixture cook, being careful to avoid its becoming brown. Then add three cupfuls of milk and after it has come to a boil break in carefully as many fresh eggs as there are persons to be served. Take the eggs out when the whites are cooked, place them on a shallow dish and pour the fish over them.
A cream-sauce codfish with eggs poached directly in the sauce. The hinge is the salt: everything else is straightforward, but if the fish is not properly freshened the dish is inedible.
- "When the fish is fresh enough"This is the whole recipe in four words. Modern salt cod is usually heavily cured and wants 8 to 24 hours of soaking in cold water in the refrigerator, changed three or four times, not the hour or two on the stove back that the original implies. Taste a shred raw: it should read as pleasantly seasoned, not saline.
- The back of the stoveOn a wood or coal range this was the cool zone, roughly a warm hold rather than a simmer. Use the lowest burner setting, or simply soak cold and skip the heating step entirely.
- A pint bowlful of shredded fishRoughly 8 oz of flaked cod, though note that the original measures the pint before soaking rather than after, so any weight is approximate. Pull it apart along the grain and discard any membrane or bone you find.
- Butter the size of an egg2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. With one tablespoon of flour that is a very loose roux; the sauce will be thin and pooling rather than thick, which is what the dish wants.
- Cook the flour without colourTwo or three minutes over moderate heat to lose the raw taste. Browning it would give a nutty tinge that fights the milk and the fish.
- Poaching in the sauceThree cups of milk in a wide pan gives enough depth to slide eggs into. Break them in over low heat and expect 3 to 4 minutes for set whites and liquid yolks; a hard boil will curdle the milk and toughen the whites.
- Season at the endNo salt is listed because the fish supplies it. Taste the finished sauce before deciding, and add black pepper generously.
- YieldThe recipe fixes only the eggs, one per person, and states no number of servings; the three cups of milk and pint of fish suggest something in the region of four. Buttered toast or split biscuits under the eggs would catch the sauce.
Salt cod was among the cheapest proteins in the nineteenth-century American pantry, shipped dry from the New England fisheries and kept for months without ice. Breakfast chapters of the period are thick with it: creamed codfish, codfish balls, codfish hash, all built on the same routine of freshening in water and then reuniting the fish with milk or butter fat. Cookbooks of this kind still assumed a household that bought fish by the whole dried side and shredded it by hand, and that had a range with a cool back shelf where a pan could sit for hours unattended. The pairing with poached eggs, one per diner, reflects the era's sense of a proper breakfast as a hot, substantial, protein-heavy meal rather than a light one, and the instruction to count the eggs by the number at table suggests a cook serving a known household rather than a fixed number of portions.