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Fish
freshly mashed, seasoned well with salt, butter, a little cream or rich milk, and one egg yolk added to each cup of potato. Beat the mixture until light before adding the fish. Form into flat cakes and brown in a little salt pork fat.
1 cup cooked fish, 1 tablespoonful club
This is a page fragment: it begins mid-sentence and breaks off mid-ingredient, so the proportions have to be reconstructed. What survives is a standard fish-and-potato cake, and the surviving instructions are enough to work from.
- What is missingThe opening words describing the potatoes are lost, and the final line breaks off at "I tablespoonful club" — almost certainly club sauce, a bottled Worcestershire-style condiment sold under that name in the period. Read the trailing measurements as the summary ingredient list rather than a new step.
- The working ratioThe text gives one cup cooked fish to a quantity of potato that is not stated on this page. Equal volumes of flaked fish and mashed potato is a reasonable reconstruction, though period recipes vary and often use more potato than fish; the one egg yolk per cup of potato is as written.
- Beat before the fish goes inThe instruction that matters: lighten the seasoned potato with the yolk first, then fold the fish in. Beating after the fish is added shreds the flakes and gives a pasty cake instead of one with visible pieces of fish.
- Salt pork fatRender a few thin slices of salt pork and cook the cakes in the fat left behind. Bacon fat is the nearest substitute; the pork is there for salt and savour as much as for frying medium, so hold back on added salt until you know which fat you are using.
- Chill the cakesNot in the original, but potato-bound cakes hold their shape far better after twenty minutes in the refrigerator. Formed cakes about three-quarters of an inch thick brown in roughly four minutes a side over medium heat.
- Which fishAny cooked white fish left from a previous meal suits this: cod, haddock or halibut. Salmon and smoked fish both work, but smoked fish needs the seasoning cut back sharply.
- YieldOn the reconstructed proportions, one cup of fish with a matching cup of potato should make roughly six to eight small cakes, enough for two or three as a main course.
Fish cakes of this kind were an everyday economy in households where cooked fish and mashed potato were the two things most likely to be left over from the night before. The salt pork fat points to a period and a region: a slab of salt pork was a standing kitchen fixture in New England, used for frying, for flavouring chowders, and for larding lean meat, and it supplied the fat for dishes like this well after commercial lard and vegetable shortening were available. "Club sauce," the cut-off ingredient, was one of many bottled Worcestershire-type sauces sold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.