Page:Art of Cookery 1774 edition.djvu/415

Rh oil, eat very fine cold with shalot, or oil and vinegar. Observe, in the pickling of your fish, to have the pickle ready: first put a little pickle in; then a layer of fish; then pickle; then a little fish, and so lay them down very close, and to be well covered; put a little saffron in the pickle. Frying fish in common oil is not so expensive with care; for present use a little does; and if the cook is careful not to burn the oil, or black it, it will fry them two or three times.

GET a fine belly of tripe, quite fresh. Take a four gallon cask well hooped, lay in your tripe, and have your pickle ready made thus: take seven quarts of spring-water, and put as much salt into it as will make an egg swim, that the little end of the egg may be about an inch above the water; (you must take care to have the fine clear salt, for the common salt will spoil it) add a quart of the best white wine vinegar, two sprigs of rosemary, an ounce of all spice, pour it on your tripe; let the cooper fasten the cask down directly; when it comes to the Indies, it must not be opened till it is just a-going to be dressed; for it won't keep after the cask is opened. The way to dress it is, lay it in water half an hour; then fry it or boil it as we do here.

The general rule for steeping of dried fish, the stock-fish excepted.

ALL the kinds, except stock-fish, are salted, or either dried in the sun, as the most common way, or in prepared kilns, or by the smoke of wood-fires in chimney corners; and in either case, require the being softened and freshened in proportion to their bulk or bigness, their nature or dryness; the very dry sort, as, bacalao, cod fish or whiting, and such like, should be steeped in luke warm milk and water; the steeping kept as near as possible to an equal degree of heat. The larger fish should be steeped twelve, the small, as whiting, &c. about two hours. The cod are therefore laid to steep in the evening, the whitings, &c. in the morning before they are to be dressed; after the time of steeping, they are to be taken out, and hung up by the tails until they are dressed: the reason of hanging them up is, that they soften equally as in the steeping, without extracting too much of the relish, which would make them insipid; when thus