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Fish Cakes
Make a savoury gravy, by boiling down the heads, tails, fins, and bones of any fish, with water enough to cover them. Add an onion, a tea-spoonful of mixed herbs, pepper, salt, and a very little mace. With the meat, when well minced, mix a third part of the quantity of bread-crumbs, and a flavouring of the same kind as that used for gravy. Moisten with melted butter, and bind with white of egg. Cover this cake with raspings, and fry with a plate over it in butter till of a light brown. When the gravy has been strained from the trimmings, put it, with the cake, into a stewpan, cover close, and stew gently for a quarter of an hour. Time, eight to ten minutes to fry.
A frugal Victorian way of using up cooked fish and its trimmings in one operation: the bones make the sauce, the flesh makes the cake. The wording assumes you already have cooked fish to hand.
- Start with cooked fishThe recipe never says to cook the fish, though the short frying and stewing times suggest it is already cooked; this belongs with the tradition of using yesterday's boiled cod, haddock or salmon. If you work with about 12 oz (350 g) of flaked fish, the "third part" of breadcrumbs comes to roughly 4 oz (115 g) — but the recipe gives no quantities, and does not say whether the proportion is by weight or by volume.
- RaspingsRaspings are the dried, sieved crumbs made from grating the crust of stale bread. Dried breadcrumbs or panko give the same crisp coating; fresh crumbs will darken before the cake heats through.
- "A very little mace"Blade mace is the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. A pinch of ground mace, or a single blade dropped into the stock and strained out, is the intended quantity — it should not be identifiable.
- The stockFish trimmings need 20-30 minutes at a bare simmer and no more; long boiling turns the bones bitter and clouds the liquid. Strain through muslin before it goes anywhere near the cake.
- The plate over the panThe recipe says only to "fry with a plate over it". The plate most probably acts as a cover; it may also help hold a single large cake together while it is fragile, before the egg white has set. Slide the cake out onto the plate to turn it rather than trying to flip it with a slice.
- One cake or severalDespite the title, the method describes a single large cake, which is why it needs the plate and the gentle stewing. Small individual cakes fry more reliably; if you make them, skip the stew and serve the strained gravy separately, reduced a little.
- The final stewA quarter of an hour covered in gravy will soften the raspings; the crust is unlikely to stay crisp, and the sauce appears to be meant to soak into it. If you want it crisp, stop after the eight to ten minutes' frying the recipe allows and serve the strained gravy round it.
- YieldServes three to four as a light main course with the gravy poured round, or six as a first course.
Fish cakes of this kind belong to the Victorian preoccupation with the second appearance of a dish: a large boiled fish came to table on one day and returned, minced and rebound, on the next. The recipe demonstrates two techniques at once — extracting a fish gravy from bones and trimmings that would otherwise be thrown out, and binding minced flesh with crumbs and egg white. Frying the cake and then stewing it in a gravy drawn from the same fish is in keeping with nineteenth-century English practice. Mace was a common warm seasoning for fish and potted meats in British kitchens over a long period, outlasting most other survivals of medieval spicing.