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Fish Cutlets
Season one pint of any kind of cold cooked fish with salt, pepper and cayenne, and make it into paste with a little thick cream sauce, made quite hot. Put the paste on a dish to about half an inch in thickness, and when it is cold form it into the shapes of cutlets. Put them first into bread or cracker crumbs, then into egg and again into crumbs. Fry in a fryingpan of hot fat until brown. If lobster is used, insert a small claw at the end of each cutlet, and for other kinds of fish use a small piece of thick bone. Drain off the fat and serve.
A Victorian and Edwardian way of using up cooked fish, closer to a croquette than a cutlet. The whole thing turns on how firm the paste is before you shape it.
- Chill it hardThe paste must be cold and stiff before shaping or the cutlets slump and burst in the fat. Spread it half an inch thick as directed and refrigerate at least two hours, or overnight; the original relied on a cold larder for the same effect.
- "Thick cream sauce"This means a heavy béchamel — roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1/2 cup milk or cream, cooked until it pulls away from the pan. Add it hot, a spoonful at a time, using only enough to bind. Too much and the mixture will never set.
- A pint of fishA pint measure of flaked cooked fish is roughly 10-12 oz by weight, enough for perhaps half a dozen small cutlets, or two to three servings depending on how you shape them. The original allows any cold cooked fish; salmon, halibut, cod and lobster all work, and you may find a strong oily fish such as mackerel less agreeable here.
- The breading orderOscar's crumb–egg–crumb sequence is deliberate: the first dry coat gives the egg something to grip on a soft, damp paste. Flour will do the same job if you prefer. Chill the breaded cutlets again for 20 minutes before frying.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only 'hot fat'; in modern terms a shallow-frying range of about 360-375F works well. Too cool and the crust absorbs grease and the cutlets fall apart; much hotter and the outside colors before the center is heated through. They only need two to three minutes, since the fish is already cooked.
- The claw and the boneA small lobster claw or a piece of bone stuck in the narrow end is pure Victorian table theater, imitating the protruding rib of a real veal cutlet. Purely decorative, and safe to leave out.
- ServingThe original stops at draining. These want an acid or a sauce — lemon, tartare, tomato sauce, or a thinned version of the same cream sauce used to bind them.
The "cutlet" made of minced or flaked food, shaped to mimic a chop and finished with a false bone, was a staple of nineteenth-century professional cookery, and the fish version was a common genteel answer to yesterday's boiled salmon or halibut. It belongs to the same family as the croquette, which French kitchens had been shaping and crumbing since well before Oscar Tschirky's day; the flat cutlet form simply looked more like a serious course on the plate. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf from 1893, published his Cook Book in 1896 as an enormous compendium of the hotel kitchen's repertoire, and thrifty made-over dishes like this sit in it alongside far grander ones — a reminder that even a luxury hotel kitchen worked hard at using up cooked fish. The lobster claw pressed into the end is characteristic of the period's appetite for making a dish announce its own contents.