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Salmon Fritters
Take the remains of cooked kippered salmon. Remove the skin and bone, and tear the flesh into small flakes. Mix with these an equal quantity of potatoes mashed with plenty of cream. Bind the mixture with yolk of egg, make it into small cakes or fritters, and fry in hot fat till they are lightly browned. Drain them, and serve on a hot dish: garnish with hard-boiled eggs minced and placed round the dish in small mounds, white and yellow alternately. Send mustard sauce to table in a tureen. Time, five or six minutes to fry the fritters.
A leftovers dish that works as written, provided you account for how salty kippered salmon is and how loose the potato binding can get.
- Kippered salmonIn British usage this is salmon that has been split, brined and smoked, not the tinned fish or the gravlax-style cure sold today. Hot-smoked salmon is the closest substitute; cold-smoked (lox-style) will also do, though it is wetter and its saltiness varies a good deal by cure, so taste before adding any salt.
- Equal quantitiesThe recipe specifies only 'an equal quantity' of mashed potato to flaked fish and gives no weights; take it as rough parity, by volume or weight as suits you, and scale to whatever leftover fish you have.
- The hinge: dry potatoMashed potato "with plenty of cream" makes a slack mixture that spreads and absorbs fat in the pan. Use floury potatoes, dry them over low heat after mashing, and chill the mixture for half an hour before shaping so the cakes hold their edges.
- Egg yolk as binderOne yolk per pound of mixture is enough; more makes the fritters custardy. If the mix still will not hold, a tablespoon of flour does more good than another yolk.
- Frying fat and heatThe recipe says only 'hot fat', without specifying depth; either shallow or deep frying in dripping, lard or oil will serve. In modern terms fat hot enough to brown the cakes lightly in the five or six minutes given is around 350-375F; cooler fat gives greasy, pale cakes.
- Mustard sauceThe recipe leaves the sauce undescribed. Period mustard sauces for fish were generally a white sauce or melted butter loosened with made English mustard, sometimes sharpened with a little vinegar. A bechamel whisked with 1-2 teaspoons of English mustard off the heat answers well.
- The garnishSeparating the whites and yolks of hard-boiled eggs and mincing them individually is what makes the alternating mounds possible. Push the yolks through a sieve for a finer effect; chop the whites with a knife.
The recipe belongs to a generation of English cookery books that devoted real attention to what was called rechauffés cookery: the systematic reuse of yesterday's fish, meat and vegetables in a form that could still be sent to table with a garnish and a sauce in a tureen. Kippered salmon was a staple of that economy, since salmon was cured in quantity in Scotland and the north of England, though fresh fish also reached southern households. The pairing with mashed potato and a mustard sauce belongs to the same frugal tradition, and the elaborate garnish of sieved egg yolk and chopped white in alternating mounds shows how a frugal dish was expected to be dressed for a household that still served in courses.