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Fish Balls Baked
cheese 1 teaspoonful lemonjuice flaked 1 cup cold rice 1 egg Salt and pepper Beat the egg until light, then add fish, rice, cheese, and seasoning. Form into small balls, place in a buttered pan and bake to a delicate brown. Serve on slices of buttered toast with tomato sauce (see page 71).
The ingredient list has come through the scanner damaged: the quantities for the fish and the cheese are lost, and only the tail ends of those lines survive. The method is intact and the dish is forgiving, but you are reconstructing proportions rather than following them.
- The missing amountsWhat survives suggests grated cheese, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, flaked fish (quantity gone), 1 cup cold rice, 1 egg, salt and pepper. A workable reading is about 1 cup flaked cooked fish to the cup of rice, with 2 to 3 tablespoons grated cheese, but the original figures cannot be recovered from this page.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given on this page. As a modern working figure, bake at 400F; the fish and rice are already cooked, so the oven is only setting the egg and colouring the surface, usually 15 to 20 minutes.
- BindingOn the reconstructed quantities (about a cup of fish to the cup of rice) one egg is a light bind. If the mixture will not hold a ball, the fish or rice is too wet; press the fish dry in a cloth first rather than adding flour.
- The riceThe recipe specifies cold rice. Warm or freshly cooked rice is wetter and stickier and the balls are more likely to slump in the pan.
- Which fishThe recipe calls only for flaked fish, so any cooked white fish, salmon or smoked haddock will do. Pick out bones by hand before flaking; the recipe assumes you have already done so.
- CheeseThe cheese is unspecified; a firm dry Cheddar-type, grated, is the safest reading. It is a seasoning here, not a filling, and too much will make the balls spread.
- Yield and servingOn the reconstructed quantities the mixture will give something over a dozen small balls, enough for three or four as a lunch dish. They are served on buttered toast with tomato sauce, which supplies most of the moisture.
Left-over cookery was a recognised genre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when refrigeration was unreliable and cooked fish had to be used quickly. Fish balls of the fried sort, bound with mashed potato, were a familiar breakfast and supper dish in New England and beyond; baking them and using cold rice as the binder is a lighter treatment that avoids deep fat. The tomato sauce cross-reference is typical of books built around a small stock of base sauces reused across many dishes, and the slice of buttered toast underneath is doing the same job a bed of rice or pasta does now: stretching a modest quantity of protein into a meal.