“George Soule has had more than ordinary luck with his dunfish this season; don’t they say so at your house, Alick?”
“Yes, sir, a small share, if you please.”
Alden stared, and his wife interposed:—
“He says he’ll have some, father. Did you know that George Soule had set up as dry-salter for the town, Alick?”
“Yes, I heard so. Indeed, father bought a quintal of dun and another of white fish of him,” replied Alick, wondering what Betty and Sally were laughing about.
“Now I don’t see why the captain portioned them that fashion,” mused John Alden, rapidly distributing the fish into fourteen empty trenchers. “For doubtless he knows as well as I, or rather your mother knows as well as our housewife here, that the only way to cook your fish aright is to bind a good dunfish carefully between two whitefish, and steep the three all night in lukewarm water; then in the morning to cast out that water and put in fresh, and again steep it so nigh the fire that it ever tries to boil yet never makes out. Finally, when all else is ready, master dunfish is released from his bondage, and carefully laid upon a platter unbroken, while his bedfellows the whitefish are thrown to the ducks or the pigs”—
“Or made into a mince wherein no man can tell the white from the dun fish,” interposed Priscilla. “Why, father, I should suppose you’d been ship’s cook all your youth, and major-domo ever since. I never mistrusted you knew how a salt codfish should be cooked.”
“I see a mort of things I don’t talk about,” retorted Alden quietly, “and if you knew not more than most women, I could tell you just how master tomcod should be served.”
“Try it, father!” cried Betty, who was her father’s darling and might say what she liked, because she never liked to say anything amiss. “Tell us now without looking around the board, tell us what should lie on it to be eaten with salt codfish.”