Tagged ‘oil’

“When there is a great store of them[bass], we eat only their heads and salt up the bodies for winter, which exceeds ling or haberdine.”

William Wood, New Englands Prospect. 1634.Vaughn ed. p. 55

 

“When [bass] are so large, the head of one will give a good eater a dinner, and for daintiness of diet they excel the marybones of beef.

Thomas Morton, New English Canaan. 1637.Dempsey ed. p. 84.

The reason there are so many roly-poly fish heads in New England is because  salt fish are just the bodies. After you catch it, and  scale it and garbage it, you cut the head off. Not all bits of the fish salt up well. That leaves you lots of heads to eat right away. And there’s plenty of good eating in the head of a fish. The cheeks and the jowls are well esteemed, and then and still in fishing communities.

And a little note on our two authors – Thomas Morton mentions a certain   Wooden Prospect several time with not a little disdain in his New Englands Canaan…whatever could he be referring to?

To Fry a Codshead

First cleve it in pieces and washe it cleane and fry it in Butter or Oyle. Then cut onions in rundels and so fry them, that doon put them in a vessel, and put to them red wine or vingre, salt, ginger, sinamon, cloves & mace, and boile all these well together, and then serve it upon your cods head.”

A.W.  A Booke of Cookrye . 1591.London. p. 12.

To Fry a Fish head

Vocabulary:

• Cleve means to cut  – you might use a cleaver…
• Rundels are slices cut the round way, which make these boiled onion rings…..
• Doon means done
• Vinegre is vinegar, and it’s interesting to see vinegar and wine being considered interchangeable.  Usually you cut the vinegar with a little water and and a small (very small, perhaps a pinch or two) of sugar.
• Sinamon is cinnamon – you probably figured that one out.
• Mace is a spice that tastes like nutmeg. It actually is the outer coating of the nutmeg, so if you don’t have mace use some nutmeg instead.

Remove the gills and rinse off your fish heads, which can be cod, bass, halibut, or salmon. Seventeenth century New England cod and bass were running between 20 and 50 pounds, which is somewhat larger that what’s generally caught now. Emmanuel Altham in 1623 caught a cod of 100 pounds. Seriously larger then what’s caught now.

This recipe has you cut the head into pieces and fry that in butter or oil. Pretty simple, but if you rather not have have the fish give you the fish eye at the table, you can boil it, and then fry the meat you’ve picked off to make a fricassee.

To make the sauce: Mix together red wine or red wine vinegar (I’d add a little water to the vinegar) with spices and oil them together.  This gives the spices to mix and meld. The smell is fantastic, and would remind our English housewife of hypocryse, a spiced wine beverage. When the sauce has somewhat mellowed, and the sharp edges have boiled off the wine and the spice, pour it over the fish. Sops of bread to catch up all the sauce would not be the least bit amiss.

Eat them up, YUM.