Home › Croquettes & Sauces › Fish Cutlets
Fish Cutlets
2 lbs. red snapper. 1 teaspoon minced onion. 1 pint white sauce. Cook fish in salt water until tender, drain and remove all bones. Mince fine, add white sauce and season to taste. Mould into cutlets, dip in beaten eggs and cracker crumbs and fry in hot fat. Serve with tomato sauce.
A croquette in cutlet shape, from an era when leftover boiled fish was a daily fact of kitchen life. The recipe assumes more than it states, chiefly about the binding sauce.
- Make the white sauce thickA pint is two cups, and at ordinary pouring consistency it will slacken two pounds of fish into paste. Build it as a panada, roughly 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour to the pint of milk, so it sets firm when cold.
- Chill before shapingThis is the hinge. Spread the mixture in a shallow pan and refrigerate at least two hours, until it can be cut rather than scooped. Cutlets moulded from warm mixture will burst in the fat.
- Poaching the fish"Cook in salt water until tender" means a bare simmer, not a boil: about 8 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness, until the flesh flakes. Hard boiling toughens snapper and clouds the flakes.
- Mince, do not puréeFlake the cooled fish by hand and chop briefly with a knife. A food processor turns it to a gummy paste that fries into a dense lump.
- BreadingFlour lightly first, then egg, then cracker crumbs; the flour layer is unstated here but keeps the egg from sliding off the wet mixture. Rest the breaded cutlets 20 minutes in the refrigerator to set the coating.
- Hot fatPeriod frying guidance for already-cooked croquette mixtures called for fat hot enough to brown a bread cube in about 40 seconds, roughly 375F; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Fry two or three minutes to a deep gold; the interior is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- Red snapperAny firm, mild white fish works: cod, haddock, pollock, or hake. True red snapper is often mislabelled at retail, and the recipe gains nothing from it.
- YieldTwo pounds of fish plus the sauce makes about twelve cutlets, serving six as a main course. Season assertively with salt, pepper, lemon and a little cayenne or nutmeg, as the mixture is bland once cold.
Mary A. Wilson wrote her 1920 cookbook out of the household columns she produced for Philadelphia readers during and just after the First World War, when the Food Administration's economy campaigns had made stretching protein a patriotic habit as well as a thrifty one. The fish cutlet belongs to that logic: a croquette mixture of cooked flesh bound with thick white sauce, moulded into the flat, tapered shape of a chop and sometimes finished with a paper frill or a bit of macaroni stuck in one end to mimic the bone. The technique is straightforwardly French, descended from the croquette of nineteenth-century professional kitchens and carried into American domestic-science teaching, where the standard bound sauce was drilled as a foundation from which dozens of dishes could be made. And that shape tells you exactly what it was for: a dish to appear where a chop otherwise would.