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Hake Cutlets, Fried
Cut two pounds of hake into cutlets, dry them well, and dip them into a thin batter of flour and water. Cover them with bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot lard or dripping, until brightly browned on both sides. Put them on blotting-paper, to drain the fat from them, and serve on a napkin. Garnish with parsley. Melted butter, anchovy sauce, or gravy piquant (see GRAVY PIQUANT) may be sent to table with them. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 3d. or 4d. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A plain Victorian fish fry that depends almost entirely on dry fish and hot fat. Hake is soft-fleshed and turns to mush if the oil is cool or the pieces crowd the pan.
- What a cutlet is hereNot a fillet but a crosswise steak cut through the bone, roughly an inch thick. Ask for hake steaks; two pounds gives four to six pieces. Skin-on is fine and helps hold the flesh together.
- Dry them wellThis is the hinge. Hake carries a lot of surface water, and wet fish steams the crumb coating off. Pat each piece dry and leave uncovered on a rack in the fridge for twenty minutes before coating.
- Flour-and-water batterA thin slurry used as glue for the crumbs, not a coating in its own right. It works, but a beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water grips crumbs far better and browns more evenly.
- Fat and temperatureLard or beef dripping at 350-375F. Enough to come halfway up the pieces for shallow frying. If the fat is not shimmering when the fish goes in, the crumbs will absorb it and slump.
- The quarter of an hourFifteen minutes most likely covers frying the whole batch rather than each cutlet, though the book does not say which. Inch-thick steaks need roughly four to five minutes a side; they are done when the flesh parts cleanly from the bone.
- Blotting-paper and the napkinDrain on paper towels or a wire rack instead. Modern blotting paper is not made for food contact, and the folded linen napkin was a serving convention for absorbing fat at table rather than anything the dish needs.
- Sauces"Melted butter" in Victorian usage means a flour-thickened butter sauce, closer to a thin white sauce than to plain drawn butter. Anchovy sauce is that same base with anchovy essence stirred in.
- Cost and yieldThreepence or fourpence a pound is pre-decimal currency and tells you hake was a cheap fish. The stated three or four servings holds for two pounds of bone-in steaks.
Hake was for centuries a working fish in Britain and Ireland, landed in quantity off the western coasts and priced accordingly, cheap enough to sit well below the dearer flatfish on any fishmonger's list. Its soft flesh does not travel or keep as well as cod, so it was eaten near the ports and often salted or dried for the Spanish market, where merluza remained prized long after British cooks had come to treat hake as a second-rank fish. The treatment here is the standard nineteenth-century method for any firm-enough white fish cut into steaks: crumb it, fry it, drain it, and let a sauce sent separately do the seasoning. The list of accompaniments, from plain melted butter through anchovy to a sharp gravy piquant, reflects a kitchen that built its variety from a stock of standing sauces rather than from the dish itself.