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Fresh Fish Cakes
4 Any kind of cooked fish can be used for these.
It should be shredded fine and highly seasoned with salt, pepper, and a little Worcestershire sauce, if liked. Moisten dry fish, such as fresh cod or haddock, with a little melted butter. Mix the fish with an equal quantity of mashed potato.
The best results are obtained when the potato is a
The text breaks off mid-sentence, so the finishing steps are missing, but the method is complete enough to work from: seasoned shredded fish, equal parts mashed potato, formed and fried. The lost clause almost certainly recommended potato still warm from the pot, which is the difference between a cake that holds and one that crumbles.
- The hinge: warm, dry potatoMash made from floury potatoes (russet or similar), still warm and with no milk or cream beaten in, binds the fish without turning gluey. Cold refrigerated mash and waxy potatoes both produce a wet, pasty mixture that slumps in the pan.
- Equal quantity means by volumeEqual quantity -- the recipe does not say whether by weight or by volume; measuring the shredded fish and the mash in the same cup is one workable reading. Roughly 2 cups of each will make about eight cakes.
- Bones and skinCooks of the period would often have been working from a whole boiled fish and picking it over. Shred by hand rather than with a fork or processor so you feel the pin bones, and discard skin unless it is very well cooked.
- Binding and shapingIf the mixture will not hold a shape, a beaten egg per 4 cups of mixture is the usual remedy. Chill the formed cakes 30 minutes before frying; they firm up and are far less likely to break when turned.
- Cooking, since the book does not sayCoat lightly in flour, fine dry breadcrumbs, or a mix of both, and shallow-fry in butter and oil over medium heat, about 4 minutes a side until deeply browned. Both the fish and the potato are already cooked, so the frying is only for crust and heat.
- Seasoning is not optional"Highly seasoned" is doing real work here: boiled cod or haddock and plain mash are both bland, and an underseasoned cake tastes of nothing. Salt generously, and add lemon juice, chopped parsley, mustard or a little grated onion alongside the Worcestershire.
- Leftover fish handlingThe recipe does not say how recently the fish should have been cooked. Use fish that has been refrigerated and is no more than two days old, and bring the finished cakes through to steaming hot at the centre, not merely browned outside.
- Salted and smoked fishIf you substitute salt cod or smoked haddock, cut the added salt entirely and taste before shaping. Both are considerably saltier than the fresh cod and haddock the recipe names.
Fish cakes of this kind are thrift cooking: a dish built from the remains of a boiled fish, stretched with potato. Books of "left overs" were popular in Britain and America from the 1890s through the First World War, when domestic economy was taught as a discipline and wasting food was treated as a moral failing as much as a financial one; recipes of this sort were often written as principles rather than fixed formulas, hence the instruction to use "any kind of cooked fish" and an "equal quantity" of mash. Broadly similar fish-and-potato mixtures underlie the New England codfish cake, the British fishcake sold at the fried-fish shop, and the Scandinavian and Portuguese versions made with salt cod, though the proportions vary from one to another. Worcestershire sauce, bottled commercially from the late 1830s, was by this period a common household means of putting savour into plain, pale dishes.