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Fish Cutlets
1 cup cold cooked fish 1/2 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour Yolk of 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon chopped onion 1/2 1/2 teaspoon chopped parsley 1/2 teaspoon salt Dash of red pepper Uncooked macaroni Bread crumbs and egg Make a cream sauce of the butter, flour and milk; add the egg, then the fish and seasonings. Mix carefully and let cool; form into cutlet shapes; dip in egg and bread crumbs and fry in hot fat. Insert in each cutlet a small piece of uncooked macaroni to represent the bone; conceal place of insertion with chopped parsley.
A croquette mixture bound with a very stiff white sauce, shaped and crumbed. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how thick that sauce is and how cold the mixture gets before shaping.
- The binding sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to only half a cup of milk gives a paste stiff enough to stand a spoon in — that is intentional, not an error. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk, then beat until it pulls away from the pan in a mass.
- Adding the yolkTake the pan off the heat before beating in the yolk, or it will scramble in threads through the sauce. The residual heat of the panada cooks it.
- Chill properly"Let cool" is the whole of the instruction; in practice the mixture needs to be cold and firm right through before shaping, which means an hour or two in the refrigerator. Warm mixture will not hold a cutlet shape and will burst in the fat.
- The stray fractionThe line reading "1/2 1/2 teaspoon chopped parsley" is a garbled fraction, whether set wrong or mistranscribed. Half a teaspoon is the sensible reading, plus more for garnishing the joint.
- Red pepperPeriod shorthand for cayenne, not paprika or crushed chilli flakes. A dash means a scant pinch.
- The fatThe recipe says only "hot fat." Croquette mixtures of this kind are usually fried in fat hot enough to set the crumb at once, three to four minutes until deep gold; fry a couple at a time so the temperature does not crash, and drain on paper.
- The macaroni boneA piece of dry macaroni pushed into the narrow end mimics the rib bone of a veal cutlet. It stays raw and hard and is decoration only — it should be pulled out before eating, not chewed.
- The fishAny firm cooked white fish or salmon, flaked fine and picked over for bones. Leftover poached or baked fish is the point; canned salmon would also serve.
- YieldAbout four small cutlets — one modest serving each as a luncheon dish with a green sauce or tartare, two servings if the cutlets are made large.
Shaping minced food into the silhouette of a chop, then finishing the illusion with a fake bone, is a piece of restaurant showmanship often said to have migrated into domestic cookery books. Making a cup of leftover fish look like a cutlet was not a joke but a courtesy to the diner: a dish had been served, even when the meat had not.