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Fish Cakes
Soak one-half pound boneless codfish in cold water for sixteen hours, changing the water three times during that interval. Drain, place it in a saucepan again with cold water and let boil for five minutes; drain and carefully pick out all the little bones from the cod. Pass it through a chopping machine or pound it in a mortar.
Have one pound cooked, peeled potatoes. Press them through a sieve. Add the fish to the potatoes. Break in two whole raw eggs, add a saltspoon ground English mustard, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, two saltspoon white pepper and one and a half teaspoons anchovy sauce. Mix the whole thoroughly in a bowl with a wooden spoon for three minutes.
Sprinkle two tablespoons flour on a table. Spread the preparation nicely over the flour and divide it into six equal parts; neatly roll them in the flour, giving them nice cake forms.
Heat one ounce butter or good fat in a frying pan, drop in the cakes and fry for three minutes on each side, or until of a good golden colour. Remove them with a cake turner and drain well. Dress on a hot dish with a napkin and serve very hot.
A salt-cod cake built on a 2:1 ratio of potato to fish. The soaking is the whole recipe; everything after it is assembly.
- Sixteen hours is not negotiableSalt cod sold as "boneless" is still heavily cured. Sixteen hours in cold water with three changes, refrigerated, is the right order of magnitude; taste a shred of the raw fish after soaking and if it is still aggressively salty, give it more time and another change of water. Undersoaked cod makes cakes that cannot be rescued, since no salt is added later.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning is 1/4 tsp mustard powder, 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg and 1/2 tsp white pepper for roughly a pound and a half of mixture.
- Ground English mustardDry mustard powder, not the prepared paste in a jar. Colman's is the direct descendant. Prepared English mustard would work but is wetter and sharper; use about half a teaspoon if that is what you have.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled sauce of anchovy, vinegar and spice, in commercial sale in Britain long before this recipe was written and still available there. Worcestershire sauce is the closest supermarket substitute, or a teaspoon of anchovy paste loosened with a little water.
- PotatoesUse floury potatoes (russet, Maris Piper), boiled or steamed in their skins, peeled hot and riced or sieved while still warm. Waxy potatoes and any mashing done with a machine give a gluey mix that will not hold a cake shape.
- Still pick over the fishThe instruction to hunt for "little bones" after the five-minute boil is sound even with modern fillets. Flake the drained fish by hand before it goes into the mortar or processor, and pulse rather than puree if using a machine.
- Chill before fryingNot in the original, but the mixture handles far better after twenty minutes in the refrigerator. Shape, chill, then flour and fry.
- The panOne ounce of butter is about two tablespoons, which is a shallow film in a large pan. Butter alone will brown before three minutes a side at any real heat; half butter and half neutral oil, over medium, gives the golden colour without scorching. The mixture is already cooked, so you are only browning.
- YieldSix cakes, which is two portions as a main course with a green vegetable, or six as a first course or breakfast dish. The "napkin" is a folded linen cloth on the serving dish to absorb frying fat.
Salt cod cakes bound with potato belong to every Atlantic cooking tradition that had access to the Newfoundland fishery, from Portuguese bolinhos de bacalhau to New England codfish balls to Norwegian and West Indian versions. What marks this one as belonging to a British-influenced professional kitchen is the seasoning: dry English mustard, nutmeg, white pepper and bottled anchovy sauce, a combination often associated with the late nineteenth-century hotel cook. The long soak is a reminder that until refrigeration reached the retail trade, heavily salted cod was one of the few forms in which sea fish reached inland households at all.