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Fish Cake

A savory cake made from cold fish, onion, herbs, bread crumbs, mashed potatoes, and egg, served with a fish gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Fish Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Remove the meat from the bones of the fish, including the head and fins, and place them in a pot with the water.

  2. Add salt, pepper, onion, and herbs, then simmer slowly for about 2 hours to make gravy.

Shape and fry the cake

  1. Finely chop the fish meat and mix it with bread crumbs, cold potatoes, parsley, and seasoning.

  2. Form the mixture into a cake and brush the top with beaten egg, then coat with additional bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the cake in a pan until light brown.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the gravy and pour it over the cake, then simmer gently for 15 minutes, stirring carefully once or twice.

  2. Serve hot, garnished with slices of lemon and parsley.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + dilltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: p-mentha-1,3,8-triene (camphor, herbal).

  3. Thyme + dilltop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (apple, fatty).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Dill + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together423 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cold potatoes
Adds body and moisture, helping the mixture hold together as a cake.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind the mixture, and form a browned outer coating.
Egg
Binds the mixture and helps the top coating set and brown.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and depth of flavour to the gravy.
Fish
Provides the main protein and flavour of the cake and the gravy.

The step that matters

Simmering the gravy slowly. A gentle simmer extracts flavour from the bones, head and fins without clouding the liquid. Boiling hard can make the gravy cloudy and greasy and can toughen the fish proteins.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, parsley, thyme, dill, pepper, bread, potato):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, parsley, thyme, dill, pepper, bread, potato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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