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Fried Salmon Cutlets
Take a quantity of cold boiled salmon, pick out all the bones and skin, pound it in a mortar, and to every six ounces of salmon allow two ounces of finely mashed potatoes; add to the potatoes pepper, salt, cayenne and mace to taste. When the seasoning is well stirred in add the pounded fish and mix all thoroughly. Flatten the mixture out, shape it into small cutlets. Brush them over with beaten egg, sprinkle them with fine breadcrumbs and fry to a light brown. Serve a quantity of anchovy sauce with them.
A leftovers dish from the era when a whole poached salmon was a common centrepiece and the cold remains had to go somewhere. The proportions are given by weight, which makes it easy to scale.
- The hinge: chill before you shapeThe mixture must be thoroughly cold and firm before it is formed, egged and crumbed, or the cutlets slump and burst in the pan. Mix, spread it out in a shallow dish, and refrigerate at least an hour; shape and crumb straight from the cold.
- The ratioThree parts salmon to one part potato by weight — 6 oz fish to 2 oz mashed potato. That is a high proportion of fish, so the binding is fragile by design. The original binds with potato alone and uses egg only as a coating; if you want insurance, a whole beaten egg worked into every pound of mixture is a modern addition, not part of the recipe.
- Scaling and yieldThe stated 6 oz plus 2 oz makes perhaps two or three small cutlets, depending how small you shape them. For four people, figure roughly 1 1/2 lb cooked salmon and 8 oz mashed potato, holding the same three-to-one ratio.
- Mortar or machineA food processor will do the pounding, but in short pulses only. Run it continuously and you get a smooth paste with the texture of pâté; the dish wants the fish broken down but still slightly shreddy.
- The potato matters"Finely mashed" means dry and lump-free — a floury baking potato, baked or steamed rather than boiled, then riced. Wet or waxy mash makes a gluey mixture that will not brown.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and lighter than the nut itself, and a standard Victorian seasoning for fish. Ground mace is still sold; a scant pinch per pound of mixture is plenty, and grated nutmeg at half the quantity is the nearest substitute.
- FryingShallow-fry in about half an inch of clarified butter or a neutral oil at 350F, two to three minutes a side. Everything in the cutlet is already cooked, so the object is colour and a crisp shell, not cooking through.
- Anchovy sauceIn this kitchen that meant a plain white sauce or thin béchamel let down with fish stock and sharpened with anchovy essence or pounded anchovy, finished with a little lemon. Anchovy essence is still bottled; two or three mashed oil-packed fillets per cup of sauce is the practical equivalent.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, and the book that carries his name is largely a compilation of the professional repertoire of the 1890s — French in its bones, English in a good many of its habits. This is one of the English ones. Fish cutlets and rissoles belonged to a whole class of Victorian and Edwardian dishes built on the remains of yesterday's joint or poached fish, pounded with potato, breaded and fried, and they appear in household manuals of the period. Anchovy sauce was the near-automatic accompaniment to boiled and fried fish in that tradition, a way of putting savoury depth back into flesh that had already given up its juices once. The recipe also assumes something no longer true of most kitchens: that cold boiled salmon is a thing one simply has on hand.