On thursday morning I found this email message from my sister Rosemary at Nerang, Gold Coast, Australia: “… I just said to John that I couldn’t imagine why Pickled Gizzards had missed the smoked cod mornay we always had on Good Friday, and after detailing the ingredients, he protested that I had never, ever made it !!! so now I will. Tomorrow, from memory, unless you have the actual recipe?” Of course I phoned her immediately, even before getting out of bed! I could see and smell Mum’s mornay immediately. The discussion revealed our memories of it differed in a couple of details: Ro felt it never had peas in it, but I differed. I’d forgotten the parsley, though I really should have remembered that Mum put parsley in or on pretty well everything. I don’t have the actual recipe, and don’t think I ever did. It’s just another of those wonderful family dishes learned from watching in the kitchen, which you sometimes make the way you think you remember, and that doesn’t really matter. I’m sure that’s a main way recipes evolve over the years.
While we talked, a little question was forming at the back of my mind which became clear by mid morning: How could I possibly have forgotten about this important dish in my life? And the answer is geographical. It just didn’t appear in shops and supermarkets in Outback Australia (Kalgoorlie, Post-cyclone Tracy Darwin, Katherine and Mt. Isa) and wasn’t in our Denver supermarket. Everyone I asked here agreed with Mike that it is not available here in Montevideo, either. I’d love to hear if any local readers know otherwise!!
The smoked cod referred to was South African, and Australia imports quite a bit of it. This week in Australia, Woolworths had it on special and their ad has a nice pic of how I remember it in our kitchen. The painted orange coloured fillets were fairly dry, sent home from the deli in white paper. Mike remembers as a little boy going into Ingles’ grocery store in The Quadrant, Launceston, with his grandfather. A wooden box of smoked cod fillets was always on the counter top, and he remembers that being rather smelly.
I really recommend “Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World” by Mark Kurlansky that I read some years ago now and loved. Kurlansky has published more including one on oysters on the half shell and another on milk, I’m a bit behind… so many books, so little time.
I had no luck finding a recipe quite like Mum’s, but some were close, typically featuring potato rather than the rice in her recipe. Smoked cod mornay was one of her great informal entertaining standbys; and sometimes when she had company for an actual dinner party she’d dig out the empty scallop shells, put individual serves of her mornay mixture into each, cover with breadcrumbs dotted with butter, bake and present the shells on small plates as an entree, to be eaten with a fish fork only. (American friends – in most of the English speaking world the French word ‘entree’ refers to an opening course that you call a ‘starter’.)
Now you might be wondering ‘ But what about the smoke flavouring essence?’ and that’s a good question! I remembered it 6 minutes after I’d put it in the oven 🙂 After consultation with my resident assistant chef I decided that although I’d tasted it before placing in the oven and found it was very nice, I really had forgotten entirely about the smokey flavour it was meant to have, a major purpose of this whole exercise !!! So after a few seconds’ hesitation, I pulled the dish out, removed what I could of the breadcrumb layer, stirred in what finally amounted to about 1/4 of the bottle to get what I thought was a right level of smoke flavour, and then replaced the breadcrumbs, adding a bit more with a little more butter.
Verdict: The flavour was great, but though moist and creamy, the colour of the mornay ended up very similar to the breadcrumbs’ colour ! which of course was crunchy 🙂 sigh. I’ll make it again, and try adding a serious quantity of the smoke flavouring to the fish while it is being gently poached. This will make the fish pieces a bit browny coloured, admittedly, but the mornay might remain creamy coloured (with multicoloured bits in it) I’ll update here if that makes any difference.