Skip to main content
Main

Fish Cakes

Fish cakes made with cooked fish, potato, egg, breadcrumbs, and spices, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Haddock and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 200 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fish Cakes

six cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove bones from the fish and chop it finely.

  2. Mash the potatoes and mix them with the fish.

  3. Add pepper, salt, and cayenne, then bind the mixture with the cold sauce or half the egg.

  4. Form the mixture into six cakes.

Coat and fry

  1. Heat the frying fat in a pan.

  2. Coat the cakes with egg and breadcrumbs.

  3. Fry the cakes in hot fat until golden brown and drain on paper.

  4. Fry a few sprigs of parsley in the remaining fat.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish cakes on folded paper and garnish with 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. Haddock + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  4. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  5. Haddock + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together171 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked potato
Adds bulk and softness, keeping the cakes moist inside.
Fish
Provides the main flavour and the body of the cakes.
Egg
Binds the mixture together and forms a crust when coated and fried.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden browned outer coating when fried.
Cold thick sauce
Binds the mixture so the cakes hold their shape.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes in hot fat until golden brown. The fat must be hot enough to crisp the breadcrumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the cakes absorb grease and turn heavy and soggy before they brown.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, haddock, sauce, pepper, egg, parsley):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, haddock, sauce, pepper, egg, parsley. 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.

More fish cakes recipes

Cod 8Salmon 5Fried 3 See all 116 →

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes