Fishcakes With Capers And Horseradish-Parsley Sauce

There are (relatively) complicated ways to make fishcakes, like a method I described some years ago , which involved onions, celery and eggs, and which substituted celery root for the usual potatoes. Those are delicious, and I make something like them every now and again. Yet the basic fishcake – essentially, cooked fish and boiled potatoes smashed together and fried – is a lovely thing, and Jackie and I had a few of them for dinner the other week, with what in her native Britain is called parsley sauce: béchamel containing lots of chopped parsley. It almost goes without saying, however, that I tinkered with both the fishcakes and their sauce: only a little, but it made a difference by lending brightness to a dish that cannot always be said to sparkle. What I did was add capers to the fishcakes and freshly grated horseradish to the sauce. Neither was a stretch: Capers are much used with fish of all kinds, and horseradish is an established partner of cream sauces hot and cold. The fish came from the freezer. I am sometimes ribbed about my restauranty practice of trimming fish into neat portions of nearly uniform thickness. I do this in part because such pieces cook more evenly, but also because I like having the off-cuts in the freezer for things like ... fishcakes. In this case, the fish was hake, which is related to cod and haddock; it is just about ideal for this recipe because it breaks up easily into flakes and because it has enough flavor to fight its way through the potatoes but not so much that it swamps them. Like cod, it benefits mightily from being salted half an hour before cooking, which improves texture and flavor. Here, I use thinner pieces from the tail end; if you are using plumper fillets, add half a minute to the initial simmering time. My proportion of potato to fish (a little heavy on the potatoes) is a family preference; there’d be no harm in using equal weights of these two principal ingredients, but I don’t recommend tipping the balance too far in favor of the fish: Fishcakes are as much a potato dish as anything. Everything apart from the final frying should be done in advance to give the fishcakes time to firm up in the refrigerator.