Home › Dressed Fish › Fish Cakes
Fish Cakes
Ingredients.
One pound of cold Fish.
Six Gherkins. Half a pint of thick Brown Sauce.
One dessertspoonful of Anchovy Sauce.
The book gives proportions only; the method that would have followed in the original text is not on this page. What is here is enough to work from, since the technique for a bound fish cake of this type was standard.
- Half a pintIn a British book of this period half a pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1 1/4 cups of sauce to a pound of fish. That is a wet mixture by modern fishcake standards, which is why the sauce must be genuinely thick.
- "Thick Brown Sauce"Not bottled steak sauce. It means a made brown sauce of the period, at the richer end anything from a thickened brown gravy to a reduced espagnole, and here thick enough to hold a shape when cold. Whatever brown sauce is used needs to be reduced until a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a clear track.
- Anchovy sauceA Victorian bottled condiment of pounded anchovy, vinegar and spice, close to what is now sold as anchovy essence. A teaspoon of anchovy paste thinned with a little vinegar stands in for the dessertspoonful, which is roughly two teaspoons.
- Cold fishThe recipe assumes leftovers from a previous meal, boned and flaked. Cod, haddock, hake and salmon all work; oily fish such as mackerel will dominate the brown sauce.
- The hinge: chill before shapingMixtures bound with sauce rather than potato are unmanageable warm. Spread the mixture on a buttered plate, cool it completely and refrigerate until firm before dividing and shaping, or the cakes will not hold.
- Coating and cookingNo method survives on this page. A cake of this kind would usually be floured, egg-washed and crumbed, then either fried in deep fat or shallow-fried. For deep fat, modern guidance is 350-375F; the filling is already cooked, so the frying is only to crisp the crust and heat the centre through, about three minutes.
- Reheated fishCooked fish held in the refrigerator should be used within a couple of days and brought right through to piping hot in the centre, since the cakes are dense and heat slowly.
- YieldA pound of fish with this much sauce should give roughly eight to ten small cakes, enough for four as a course; the book gives no yield.
Fish cakes appear in many late-Victorian and Edwardian household books as a way of using the remains of a boiled turbot or salmon, but the version here leans away from the thriftiest kind: binding flaked fish with a reduced brown sauce, instead of mashed potato, makes something closer to a croquette in the French kitchen manner, and the same method with white sauce is often associated with the kromeskies and cutlets that fill the "Dressed Fish" chapters of these books. Anchovy in some form -- essence, sauce, or pounded fillet -- was a common seasoning for reheated fish in Britain through the nineteenth century, valued because it deepened flavour that boiling had washed out without reading as fish sauce in its own right. The bare ingredient list reflects how such books were used: the mixture must be cooled hard before it can be shaped, egged and crumbed.