BBC Good Food

October, 2009

Crushed Pea Fish Cakes with Chilli-Lime Mayo

Page 31

| Course Type: Main Courses

(1 review)

Tags: pea mash fish fish cakes peas finger food lunch box mayonnaise mash

Recipe Review

6th March 2010

friederike from Berlin,

Nice. I would change a few things, but none of them is dramatic. I would probably add an egg (or perhaps two) to make the fish cakes stick better, and I would add more lime zest to the mayonnaise – I tried lime juice instead, but BF complained that that made the mayonnaise turn too sour (I didn’t even notice). Also, while I quite liked the dominant taste of the peas, I would probably use more fish and fewer peas to make the cakes have a stronger taste of fish.

Neither of us could be bothered with cutting chillies, although they probably would have been a good idea.

Edited to add:
The recipe is available online here. You can also review it here.
I tried a similar recipe, Salmon Cakes with Lemon Mayo from Olive: 101 Quick-fix Dishes, but I liked this version better.

Edited 8 January 2016:
We made these again last night. I used pangasius instead of trout, and as I had read several reviews on the BBC website saying the fish cakes were bland, I added quite a bit of dried dill. The resulting fish cakes were quite nice in taste - I didn't taste the dill at all, but I guess it helped anyway ( I would expect potentially bland fish cakes to taste even blander with a characterless fish as pangasius).

However, the texture was a complete failure - they already fell apart before they hit the pan! The only thing that helped a little was deep-frying them on high heat in lots of oil, but I only made two of those before I gave up, tossed them all back into a bowl and added an egg, and that really made a difference (I would still recommend deep-frying, though, if only for the crispness). Is there anything I missed that every proper Englishman knows about making fish cakes? Like, should I have chilled the fish cakes before frying them, is that the reason why I failed? I might actually give that a try some day...