Home › The World's Kitchen › Fish Cutlets, Allahabad
Fish Cutlets, Allahabad
Remove the skin and bones from a two-pound piece fresh halibut, cod or fresh haddock, cut it in small pieces, then place on a clean board. Season with a teaspoon salt, three saltspoons curry powder, and a saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg, then chop it exceedingly fine. Pour in little by little, while chopping, a half gill cream previously mixed with an egg yolk, divide hash in six even parts, roll out on a floured table to cutlet forms and lightly dip in beaten egg. Mix on a plate three ounces bread crumbs, two ounces finely grated, cooked ham, a saltspoon ground thyme, a saltspoon ground bay leaf, and roll cutlets in this mixture.
Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a sautoir, place the cutlets in one beside another, gently cook for eight minutes on each side and take them up. Pour a curry sauce on a hot dish, arrange the cutlets over it, one overlapping another, and serve.
A fish forcemeat shaped into chop-like cutlets, crumbed and shallow-fried. The mixture is delicate, so the two things that matter are keeping it cold and not overcooking it.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of curry powder is about 3/4 teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of cream 1/4 cup.
- Chop, do not pureeThe old method is hand-chopping on a board until the fish binds with the egg-and-cream. A food processor does this in seconds but goes pasty fast; pulse in short bursts and stop while some texture remains.
- Keep everything coldTwo pounds of raw fish worked by hand at room temperature warms quickly and the emulsion breaks. Chill the fish, the cream and the shaped cutlets for 20-30 minutes before crumbing so they hold their form in the pan.
- Sixteen minutes is too longEight minutes a side would leave a half-inch fish cutlet dry and crumbly. Three to four minutes a side over medium heat is enough; the crumb coating tells you when, and the interior needs only to reach opacity, around 145F.
- Not enough fatA tablespoon and a half of butter will not carry six crumbed cutlets and will brown and burn before they cook. Use a good film of clarified butter or butter cut with a neutral oil, adding more between batches.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan with a heavy base. Any wide skillet works; the point is space so the cutlets sit apart rather than steaming against each other.
- Ground bay leafRarely sold now. Grind a dried leaf or two in a spice mill and sift; the quantity here is a quarter teaspoon, and whole leaf pieces in a crumb coating are unpleasant to bite.
- The curry sauceThe recipe assumes one is already made and gives no formula. A curry sauce of the period commonly ran to onion and curry powder cooked in butter, thickened with flour and let down with fish or veal stock, sometimes finished with cream.
- YieldSix cutlets from two pounds of fish, which serves three to four as a main course with rice, or six as a first course.
Allahabad, on the Ganges, was a major administrative city of British India, and dishes named for Indian places in Anglo-American cookbooks of this period usually signal Anglo-Indian cookery rather than anything cooked by Indian households. The tell here is the construction: this is a French forcemeat technique fish chopped fine, bound with cream and egg yolk, shaped, crumbed, saut and set on a sauce wearing curry powder, cayenne and nutmeg. Curry powder itself was a British commercial convenience, ready-blended and sold commercially in Britain from the late eighteenth century onward, though the blends differed markedly from vendor to vendor.