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Fritadelles of Fish, Tower
Skin and bone codfish left over from yesterday, then pick meat in small pieces and place on a plate. Boil three medium, peeled potatoes in a quart water with a teaspoon salt for thirty-five minutes, drain, then press through potato masher into a sautoire, add two egg yolks, an ounce good butter and a half gill cream. Mix well, then add the fish with a teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, a saltspoon nutmeg and teaspoon freshly chopped parsley. Finely chop an onion, fry in a pan with teaspoon butter until a light brown, then add to the rest. Thoroughly but gently mix with spatula, divide preparation in twelve even, oval-shaped pieces, roll in flour and lightly flatten, then lightly dip in beaten egg and roll in bread crumbs. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons melted butter in a sautoire, add the fritadelles, one beside another and cook for six minutes on each side. Drain on a cloth, arrange on a hot dish with folded napkin, decorate with six quarters lemon and parsley greens and serve.
A leftover-cod cake in the Delmonico manner, written for a cook who already knew how to handle a sauté pan. The measurements need translating and the fat quantity needs rethinking.
- Fish quantityNo weight is given for the leftover cod, and the recipe does not say how it was cooked. Something on the order of 1 to 1½ lb of cooked fish, roughly 2 to 3 cups flaked, suits the three potatoes.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is ¼ cup. A saltspoon is ¼ teaspoon: three saltspoons of pepper is ¾ teaspoon, and a saltspoon of nutmeg is ¼ teaspoon. Note that salt appears twice, a teaspoon in the potato water and another in the mixture.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan or a wide, shallow saucepan. Here it is used twice — first as a mixing bowl for the hot potato, then as the frying pan.
- Dry the potatoThis is the hinge. Drain the boiled potatoes and let them steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before mashing; wet potato gives cakes that slump in the flour and split in the pan. Thirty-five minutes is long for whole peeled medium potatoes — check at 20 to 25 minutes and pull them as soon as a knife slides through.
- Mix gently, then chillThe instruction to mix "thoroughly but gently" with a spatula matters: worked hard, mashed potato turns gluey. Once shaped and breaded, half an hour in the refrigerator makes the twelve cakes far easier to turn.
- Frying fatTwo tablespoons of butter will not carry twelve cakes; the milk solids brown and burn before the second side is done. Use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, and fry in two batches, wiping the pan between.
- Cooking timeThe fish and potato are already cooked and only the egg binder and coating need setting, so six minutes a side over moderate heat is about crust more than doneness. Four to five minutes a side to a deep gold is usually enough; longer only dries them.
- Yield and serviceTwelve cakes, four servings as a main course with the six lemon quarters, six as a first course. The folded napkin on the platter is period presentation, and would have taken up any fat left after the draining.
"Fritadelle" is Filippini's spelling of fricadelle, the French form of a word that travels across northern Europe as German Frikadelle and Danish frikadeller — a small fried cake of chopped meat or fish, generally traced to the same root as fricassée, from a verb for cutting up and frying. Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York; the second word here appears to be a label rather than an instruction, and its intended reference is not clear from the book itself. What is entirely clear is the domestic logic: yesterday's boiled cod, bound with potato, egg and a little cream, is the standard nineteenth-century answer to leftover fish, and the same formula produces the New England codfish cake and the English fish cake with only small changes of seasoning.