Sailor Rations - Stockfish Aboard Ship

Welcome to 18th century cooking I'm Jon Townsend  today we are outside because we we are cooking   the stinkiest recipe yet stockfish, whoo, thanks  for joining us today as we savor the flavors and   the aromas of the 18th century. So what is stock  fish? Stockfish is dried cod they catch cod they   gut it and then they put it out to sort of dry out  freeze dry it almost on these big racks in Norway   so you can imagine they have all these thousands  and thousands of Cod that are drying out in the   cold weather takes months for these things to  dry out completely stockfish is a very old type   of food preservation technique they've been doing  this for over a thousand years stockfish shows up   in English literature Shakespeare talks about  stockfish there are regulations and loss about   stockfish early on you'll also see some references  to stock fish in the 18th century at one point we   know that it wasn't popular with general people  because they actually were trying to encourage the   importation of stockfish and stockfish recipes.  To help us understand how to use stock fish in a   recipe there's a fascinating entry in Nicholas  Cresswell's journal. Nicholas Cresswell was a   young man going from England to North America to  seek his fortune and he's on board ship here in   1774 he says "dined on stockfish and potatoes this  fish is cured in the frost without salt before it   is boiled they beat it with iron hammers against  the anchor stock to soften it a general dish on   Fridays and is reckoned a great delicacy but to  me it is none for I hate the smell of it". Poor   Nicholas Cresswell but we find out here that  they they take this stock fish which you can   imagine how do you cook this into food and they  beat it with hammers to soften it up and then   they boil it. So I was checking a bunch of  different references, cooking references, in   the 18th century with stock fish and almost every  single reference it talks about cooking stockfish   mentions the idea of beating it with hammers now  modern-day cooking with stock fish they don't beat   it with hammers but that's what we're gonna do  let's start prepping our fish by beating it with   a hammer. So what we're doing is softening this  fish up if we don't soften it up with a hammer it   will take three or four days of soaking to make  this soft enough to actually do something with   it if we beat it with the hammer it will take much  less time we might only need to soak it for half a   day or just a few hours or maybe if it's in small  enough pieces we can just toss it right into the   boiling water and it'll cook with the potatoes.  So let's make a fish stew just like the one the   Nicholas Cresswell tried to eat but couldn't eat  here's our fish we've already got this beat with   our hammer so it's softened up the pieces are kind  of broken up a little bit now the trick here with   this fish is we've got skin on it we've still got  bones inside here cartilage pieces all kinds of   things we don't want to eat necessarily and while  we could toss this in or try to take out bits of   it it's really hard to separate the bones from the  flesh unless we just totally pulverize this thing   so that the bones broke down too - sort of like  making fish powder we could do that and then toss   it in here what a better way to do it if we still  want to have nice pieces of fish that we can tell   are fish is we want this to soak now I don't need  to soak a whole four days like we might need to do   it if we hadn't pounded it but this one I pounded  last night and then it's been soaking overnight   and you can see that it's really opened up here  and we've got some nice pieces of flesh so so   let's open this up and try to get out the bones  and we'll toss it into some nice boiling water   and get this cooking up so we're just gonna look  through here and find any kind of bones it really   doesn't seem to be a lot that's really popping  out you can definitely feel sometimes the the   backbone and that you want to get those pieces out  of there because that's that's never gonna soften   up but some of these little bones are very soft  I don't think they're gonna cause us a problem   after this gets cooked so that looks really  good one of the most fascinating things when   you soak this stock fish is to watch how much it  expands it absorbs water and changes its size the   to three or four times as thick is just amazing  to see what happens when this soaks up water. Now that our fish is boiling up let's take some  potatoes and I'm just gonna cube them up and we   can slide them right in there to boil along  with our fish. Our fish and our potatoes are   boiling up and hey no naval recipe is complete  without some ships biscuits. Ships biscuits,   how do you preserve bread for months at a time?  Well you make ships biscuits and they're very very   dense bread that's baked three and four times  very hard very breakable and we can break up   our ships biscuits into some little tiny pieces  and throw it into our stew to fill it up get it   thicker it really adds some wonderful flavor too  - so I'm gonna pound up some ships biscuits so we   can put it in to our stew. I've added some salt  and pepper and we're gonna let this boil until   those potatoes feel nice and soft probably about  a half an hour hopefully it'll be done about then. Here's our stew and it actually looks pretty good  and amazingly enough it does not smell bad at all   so maybe Nicolas Cresswell he was he was just  he got to smell it before it was cooked so maybe   that was the problem but once it's cooked doesn't  smell bad at all so the question is is what does   it taste like let's get a nice big piece of fish  here hey that is surprisingly good very nice hmm. Potatoes have kind of grabbed a little bit  of that fish flavor so they taste good ships   biscuit in something like this is perfect and  if you if you want to have a little bite left   in it have almost like a little piece of beef  and you put it in late so that it doesn't break   down too much if you want it to really sort  of fill up and thicken the stew you want to   put it in early pound it up nice and and fine  either way it's just so very good if you really   want to you know put this right over the top  just a touch of nutmeg would probably make   this perfect but as it is it is wonderful  . Boy, I am so surprised so who would have   thought something that smelled horrible when we  first got it turns out to be a wonderful dish   I'm so glad I was able to try this one out  because I wouldn't have believed it. If you   want more episodes like this and especially how  to make ships biscuits check out this episode.

Channel: Townsends

Views: 1,630,274

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, colonial cooking, historical cooking, cooking (interest), soldier food, salt pork, Dried Fish, Stockfish, hard tack

Id: QdzAt6e1l-c

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2019