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Fish Cakes with Ham
Prepare six fish cakes broil six very thin slices ham for one minute on each side, dress on a dish, arrange fish cakes on top and serve.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have fish cakes to hand, which is how these compact 1920s international collections were built. The only real cooking is the ham, and it wants a very hot surface and very little time.
- The missing half of the recipe"Prepare six fish cakes" presumably assumes a fish cake recipe given elsewhere. A standard fish cake of the period runs roughly 1 lb flaked cooked fish (or freshened salt cod) to 1 cup mashed potato, bound with an egg, shaped into flat rounds and pan-fried in butter or drippings until crusted on both sides.
- Broil means direct heatIn this period "broil" is a gridiron or the broiler compartment, not a covered pan. Get the element or grill fully hot before the ham goes near it; one minute a side only works at high heat.
- The ham to buySlices need to be genuinely thin, deli-cut. Use cooked or dry-cured ham, not raw green ham, since sixty seconds a side will not cook uncured pork through.
- Why the timing is shortThin ham slices dry out and curl into leather in three or four minutes. Pull them the moment the edges color and the fat turns translucent; they will keep cooking on the hot dish.
- Assembly order mattersCook the fish cakes first and hold them warm, then broil the ham last, since the ham is dressed on the dish and the cakes arranged on top.
- SeasoningThe original specifies none. The ham is salty enough that it is worth salting the fish cakes lightly and leaning on pepper, lemon or a spoonful of mustard rather than more salt.
- YieldSix cakes and six slices; the recipe gives no serving count, but this would stretch to three as a main course with a green vegetable, or six at breakfast.
Fish cakes were the standard second life of yesterday's boiled fish in Anglo-American kitchens, and pairing them with ham belongs to the same thrifty logic that gives us ham with haddock, bacon with trout, and salt pork with clams: a cured pork fat that seasons a bland, lean protein. Cookbooks of the early twentieth century routinely printed dozens of these one-line variations on a base preparation, expecting the cook to already know the base and simply need ideas for using it up.