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Cod-Fish Cakes
Take the remains of cold cod, remove the skin and bones, and weigh the meat. To every pound of cod allow an equal weight of well-mashed potatoes, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, a few drops of anchovy, half a tea-spoonful of chopped onion, one egg, and sufficient milk to bind the mixture together. If the fish was salted, the salt must be omitted. Make the paste up into small cakes about an inch thick, fry them in hot butter or lard till they are well browned on both sides, and serve them as hot as possible. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold fish. Allow two or three cakes for each person.
A leftovers dish with a sound ratio at its heart: equal weights of flaked fish and mashed potato. The original assumes cold boiled cod from yesterday's dinner and a cook who knows how to keep a cake together.
- The hinge: keep the mixture dryAdd the milk a spoonful at a time and stop as soon as the mixture coheres. Cod and mashed potato both carry a lot of moisture already, and a wet paste will slump and stick in the pan rather than browning.
- "A few drops of anchovy"This means anchovy essence, a thin bottled sauce still sold as such, or Worcestershire-style anchovy sauce. Modern anchovy paste from a tube works at about a quarter teaspoon per pound of fish; a mashed fillet does the same job.
- Salted fishThe instruction to omit the salt presumably covers salt cod, which was still widely eaten, though it would apply to any fish salted before or during cooking. If you are using salt cod, soak and poach it first and taste the mixture before adding anything.
- ChillingNot in the original, but half an hour in the refrigerator before frying firms the cakes considerably and is worth the wait, particularly with an inch-thick cake.
- Frying fatButter alone browns fast and burns; the lard alternative is there for a reason. A neutral oil with a knob of butter, at a steady medium heat, gives the same colour without scorching.
- Cooking throughApart from the egg and the raw chopped onion, everything in the mixture is already cooked, so you are mainly browning the outside and heating the middle. Four to five minutes a side over medium heat is usually enough for an inch-thick cake.
- Cost and yieldSixpence was the price of the potatoes, egg and seasoning only. A pound of fish with a pound of potato makes roughly eight to ten cakes, which at the book's two or three each serves three or four.
Cassell's places this among the economy dishes common to Victorian household manuals: a way of turning the cold remains of a boiled fish into a second meal that looked deliberate rather than apologetic. Boiled cod was a standard family dinner in Britain through the nineteenth century, cheap and plentiful, and salt cod remained a Lenten and Friday staple in many houses, which may account for the recipe pausing to warn about the seasoning. The equal-weights formula of fish to potato is the same one that underlies the modern fishcake and the New England codfish ball, and anchovy essence is one period answer to the problem of leftover white fish tasting of very little.