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Fish Balls
Shred finely one pound of cold cooked fish, from which all skin and bone have been removed. Take double the quantity of cold mashed potatoes and mix them with the fish. Add a table-spoonful of melted butter and a well-beaten egg. Form into round balls, or thick flat cakes, flour lightly, and fry till brown in boiling fat or lard.
A leftovers recipe of the plainest kind, and it works as well now as it did then, provided the mixture is dry enough to hold together.
- The hinge: dry the potatoTwo parts mashed potato to one of fish means the potato decides whether the balls survive the fat. Use floury potatoes mashed without milk or cream, and let the mash cool completely; wet mash slackens the mixture and it will disintegrate on contact with hot lard.
- "Double the quantity"Most likely by weight, giving 2 lb of mashed potato to 1 lb of flaked fish, though the original does not say whether weight or volume is intended. Either way it is a potato-forward cake by modern taste; going down to equal weights gives a much fishier result and still binds.
- Melted butterA tablespoon of melted butter here is for richness and to keep the mixture from turning pasty. Add it warm but not hot, or it will start to cook the egg.
- Which fishThe recipe specifies only cold cooked fish from which skin and bone have been removed; leftover boiled white fish such as cod, haddock or hake are the obvious candidates. Cooked salmon or smoked haddock both work; canned tuna or salmon, drained hard, is the closest everyday substitute.
- Frying fat and temperature"Boiling fat" means fat at frying heat, not literally boiling. Aim for 350-375F in a depth of at least an inch, and fry in batches so the temperature does not crash. Below about 325F the cakes soak fat and fall apart.
- FlouringA light dusting only, shaken off, and done just before frying. Flour left to sit on a damp mixture goes gummy and slides off in the pan.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; you have around three pounds of mixture, so size the balls or cakes to suit. Lemon, tartare or a plain parsley sauce suits them.
- Chill before fryingNot in the original, but half an hour in the refrigerator firms the shaped cakes and markedly improves how they hold.
Fish balls belong to the great nineteenth-century economy of remains -- using yesterday's boiled fish before it turned. It is really a method: cold cooked protein, bound with potato and egg, shaped and fried. The same formula appears across the period as croquettes, rissoles and cakes, distinguished mostly by shape and by whether they are egged and crumbed. The specifically fish-and-potato version had a long life on both sides of the Atlantic, becoming a fixture of the New England breakfast table, where salt cod rather than leftover boiled fish was the usual starting point, and it survives today in the British fishcake.