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Fish and Potatoes
Boil salmon or other fish; mash up boiled Irish potatoes; chop yolks of hard boiled eggs.
Mix all together with butter; make very hot, and keep it so at table.--Mrs. R.
A terse nineteenth-century use for leftover cooked fish, closer to a hot fish hash than to a fishcake. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so a few decisions have to be made before starting.
- ProportionsA workable ratio is roughly equal weights of flaked fish and mashed potato, with the yolks of two or three hard-boiled eggs and 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter per pound of each. That gives about four servings as a supper dish.
- "Irish potatoes"Simply ordinary white potatoes, named to distinguish them from sweet potatoes, which were common enough in Southern kitchens that the distinction was worth making. Use a floury variety such as russet.
- SalmonIn 1879 Virginia this may well have been canned or salt salmon rather than fresh. Canned salmon still works well here; if using salt fish, soak and taste it before adding any salt to the mixture.
- Don't overwork the mashFold the potato in rather than beating it. Worked hot with butter and then reheated, mashed potato turns gluey, and the flaked texture of the fish is the point of the dish.
- Egg yolks onlyThe recipe calls for the yolks alone. Whites can turn rubbery against soft potato, which may be the reason; either way, save them for a salad or a sandwich filling.
- "Make very hot, and keep it so"This is the hinge. The dish is unpleasant lukewarm, and the instruction implies some means of holding the heat at table. A shallow buttered baking dish kept in a low oven, or a covered pan over the lowest heat, does the same job.
- SeasoningNothing is specified. Salt, pepper, a little lemon, and a spoonful of cream or fish liquor to loosen the mixture all belong here, and mace or cayenne would be period-appropriate.
Dishes of this kind belong to the long tradition of second-day cookery that ran through American household manuals: a boiled fish from Sunday dinner, potatoes from the same meal, and eggs, bound with butter and served hot enough to seem freshly made. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, is full of such short, unmeasured entries signed with an initial, which is how recipes actually circulated among women who already knew the dish and needed only a reminder of its outline. The mention of salmon is itself a marker of the date: canned salmon from the Pacific coast reached Eastern markets in quantity in the 1870s, and its appearance in a Virginia collection alongside "or other fish" shows a cook with access to a newly convenient form of a fish that had earlier come salted, if at all.