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FISH CAKES (another way)
Take while warm the fish left from dinner, remove the skin and bones, and mix with mashed potatoes. Add pepper, salt, chopped parsley, and an ounce of butter. Moisten with an egg into a paste, and roll into balls; then flatten and dip into egg. Fry in butter or lard to a nice brown. Time, three-quarters of an hour to prepare.
A leftovers recipe with almost no quantities, which is the point: it scales to whatever fish is left on the platter. A few things are worth pinning down before you start.
- The ratio the recipe omitsCassell's gives no proportion of fish to potato. Roughly equal weights of fish and potato is a sensible balance; going much past half potato gives you a potato cake with fish in it. About 12 oz flaked fish to 12 oz mashed potato makes eight cakes.
- "While warm" mattersWarm cooked fish flakes off the bone cleanly and folds into the potato without being mashed to paste. If the fish is fridge-cold, let it come to room temperature or warm it briefly; picking cold fish is slower and the flesh breaks down more.
- Dry potato, not creamyMash made with milk and plenty of butter will slacken the mixture until it will not hold a shape. Use plain mashed floury potato, no liquid added, and let it cool before mixing so the steam escapes.
- Two eggs, not oneThe egg in the mixture binds; the egg for dipping coats. Read "moisten with an egg" as one beaten egg worked in, then a second beaten egg for the outside. Add the binding egg gradually — a very wet mash may need only half of it.
- Chill before fryingThe recipe does not say so, but twenty minutes in the refrigerator firms the cakes and is good insurance against their collapsing in the pan.
- Egg alone is a thin coatDipped in egg and nothing else, the cakes brown but have no crust and stick readily. Egg followed by fine dry breadcrumbs is the modern habit and holds up better; a well-seasoned or non-stick pan helps either way.
- FryingButter alone browns before the cakes heat through. Use clarified butter, lard, or butter cut with a neutral oil, about a quarter-inch deep over medium heat, three to four minutes a side until deep gold. The filling is already cooked; you are only setting the crust and heating the centre.
- Fish to avoidAny firm cooked white fish, salmon, or smoked haddock works. Very oily leftovers such as mackerel go strong and greasy in a fried cake.
- YieldRoughly a pound and a half of mixture gives eight cakes, enough for four with a green vegetable, or four to six at breakfast.
Fish cakes are generally traced to the Victorian and Edwardian kitchen's habits of thrift: a large boiled or baked fish was a dinner centrepiece, and what came back from the table reappeared the next morning bound with potato and fried. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, first issued in the 1870s and reprinted and revised for decades, gives more than one version of the dish. The pairing of fish with potato and a fried crust is much older than the recipe and turns up wherever the two were cheap together; the same logic produced the Anglo-Indian kedgeree that shared the late-Victorian breakfast sideboard, and the potato-bound cod cakes of coastal New England. The stated "time, three-quarters of an hour to prepare" is characteristic of the book: cookery dictionaries of the period appended a time and often a cost to each entry so a mistress could plan and price a day's meals at a glance.