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Fish Cakes

Fish cakes made from cold fish meat, potatoes, bread crumbs, and binding with egg, butter, or milk, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Fish Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Put bones, head, and fins into a saucepan with water, salt, pepper, onion, and sweet herbs to stew for gravy.

Shape the cakes

  1. Mince the fish and mix it with cold potatoes and bread crumbs, adding parsley and seasoning.

  2. Form the mixture into cakes using egg, butter, or milk to bind.

Fry and serve

  1. Coat the cakes with bread crumbs and fry until light brown.

  2. Serve hot with the prepared gravy.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 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 fish
Provides the main body and flavour of the cakes.
Cold potatoes
Add starch and body, helping the mixture hold together and stay moist.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and form a crisp, browned outer coating when fried.
Egg
Binds the mixture so the cakes hold their shape while frying.

The step that matters

Form the mixture into cakes using egg, butter, or milk to bind.. The mixture must be firm enough to hold its shape. Binders such as egg coagulate when heated and hold the fish and potato together, so a loose mix may fall apart in the pan.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, fish, pepper, potato, bread, parsley, egg. 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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