Home › Fish › Salt Fish-Oysters
Salt Fish-Oysters
Salt fish with oysters; stir together in a small saucepan until smooth, a tablespoonful of butter and a tablespoonful of flour; add gradually, stirring constantly, half a cupful of hot milk and the same quantity of oyster liquor. Cook until thick and smooth. Add a dash of white pepper, half teaspoonful salt, and a tablespoonful of butter. In this sauce simmer for twenty minutes, a half pound of shredded fish. Lastly, add a dozen oysters, which have been cooked in their own liquor and cut into halves. Let the mixture come to a boil and pour over slices of buttered toast.
A creamed salt cod on toast, of the kind that once counted as a Friday supper or a breakfast dish. Two things in the original need attention: the fish is assumed to be already freshened, and the oysters are cooked twice.
- Soak the fish firstThe recipe begins with shredded salt fish as though it needed no preparation, presumably because the reader was expected to know to freshen hard salt cod. Soak the dried fish in several changes of cold water for 8 to 24 hours depending on thickness, then drain and shred; unsoaked salt cod simmered in cream sauce will be far too salty to eat.
- Hold back the saltThe half teaspoonful of salt was written for fish that had been thoroughly freshened. Taste the sauce after the fish has simmered in it and salt only then, if at all.
- Oysters need two minutes, not two cookingsThe oysters are poached in their liquor, then returned to the sauce and brought to a boil. Poach them just until the edges ruffle, about a minute or two, and fold them in off the heat at the very end so they warm through rather than tighten into rubber.
- Oyster liquorHalf a cupful is roughly what a dozen shucked oysters yield, though it varies. If you are short, top it up with the poaching liquid or with bottled clam juice; strain it through a fine sieve to catch shell grit.
- The rouxA tablespoon each of butter and flour to a full cup of liquid gives a thin, pourable sauce, which is what you want on toast. The second tablespoon of butter goes in as enrichment after the sauce has thickened, not with the flour.
- Simmering timeTwenty minutes suits stiff, thick-shredded salt cod. Fine flakes or a thinner cure will be done in eight to ten; keep the heat very low and stir, as the milk and flour will catch.
- YieldHalf a pound of shredded fish plus a dozen oysters, in one cup of sauce, serves two or three over toast. The recipe does not say whether the half pound is weighed before or after soaking. Use a sturdy bread, well toasted, or it collapses under the sauce.
Salt cod was the ballast of the North Atlantic pantry, cheap, keepable and available inland long before refrigeration reached the grocer's shelf, and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century are thick with ways to make it interesting: creamed, in balls, in hash, on toast. Pairing it with oysters, as here, is a frugal trick with a luxurious face, since oysters were still abundant and inexpensive along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and were often said to have been used freely as a flavoring rather than treated as a delicacy. The dish belongs to the same family as creamed chipped beef and the many "on toast" suppers that filled the space between breakfast and dinner in a household without a chafing-dish menu; the white sauce built from butter, flour and a hot liquid was by then a standard taught in the cooking schools, and books of this period assume the reader can make it without being told twice.