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White Fish Balls
1 cup cold fish, mashed fine. 1/2 cup cream sauce. 1/2 cup creamed Irish potatoes.
Blend thoroughly, add 2 eggs beaten slightly, season highly with pepper, salt and little grated onion and celery. Drop from spoon in hot fat. Drain on brown paper.
A leftovers recipe: cooked fish, thick white sauce and mashed potato bound with egg and fried in deep fat. The proportions are what matter, since the mixture has to be stiff enough to hold its shape off a spoon.
- "Cream sauce"A basic white sauce, thick: something on the order of 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and 1/2 cup milk, cooked until it holds. Use the thick version; a thin sauce will give you a batter that spreads in the fat.
- "Creamed Irish potatoes"Plain mashed potatoes made with milk and butter. "Irish potato" distinguished them from sweet potatoes, a routine distinction in American books of the period.
- White fishAny lean white-fleshed fish, cooked and flaked — cod, haddock, hake, pollock. Not necessarily Great Lakes whitefish. Pick over carefully for bones and skin before mashing.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat." Modern deep-frying practice for a mixture like this is around 365-375F: cooler and the balls absorb grease and slump; much hotter and the outside colors before the egg sets. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- Consistency testChill the mixture 30 minutes before frying and try one spoonful first. If it flattens or breaks apart, work in a spoonful or two more mashed potato rather than flour, which dulls the flavor.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard drainer — grocery bag paper. Paper towels or, better, a rack set over a sheet pan does the same job without the paper sticking.
- "Season highly"Take this seriously. Cooked fish and potato bound with sauce are bland, and the grated onion and celery are doing real work. Season the mixture, then taste a small fried sample and adjust before frying the rest.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest something closer to two dozen walnut-sized balls, enough for three or four as a light main course with a lemon wedge or tomato sauce.
Fish balls were a fixture of the American Northeast long before Mrs. Wilson set them down in her New Cook Book (1920): the classic version used salt cod soaked overnight, mashed with potato and fried for breakfast, and appears in New England cookery books through the nineteenth century. What is different here is the direction of thrift — this is a recipe for using up fish already cooked and potatoes already mashed, with a half-cup of leftover cream sauce standing in as the binder. Mary A. Wilson wrote as a household economist during and just after the First World War, when federal food-conservation campaigns had made the reuse of cooked food a matter of public virtue as well as domestic sense, and her books are full of these small assemblies built from what the icebox already held.