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Breaded Sea Bass
Remove the skin from a sea bass, bone and cut fillets in pieces for serving. Rub over with the cut side of a lemon, sprinkle with salt, pepper, dredge with flour. Dip in egg (diluted with two tablespoons cold water) then in fine cracker crumbs; repeat. Place in croquette basket and fry in deep, hot Cottolene. Drain, arrange on hot serving platter. Garnish with Norwegian Potatoes, parsley and slices of lemon. Serve Sauce Tartare in a sauce boat. (For recipe for Sauce Tartare see page 84.)
A straightforward deep-fried fillet, but the original assumes a coal-range cook who judged fat by eye and a branded shortening that no longer exists.
- CottoleneA shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, and the product this book was written to promote. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works: peanut, canola or refined sunflower oil, or vegetable shortening.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only "deep, hot." Hold the oil at 365–375F. Below that the double crust drinks fat; above 400F the cracker crumbs darken before the fish is set.
- Croquette basketA wire frying basket that lowers into a deep kettle. A spider skimmer or a slotted spoon does the same job, and a heavy pot with two to three inches of oil is enough for fillet pieces.
- "Repeat" is the hingeThe egg-and-crumb coating is applied twice, which gives this dish its heavy crust. A short rest on a rack before frying will help the second layer set, though the recipe does not call for one.
- Cracker crumbsFine crumbs from a plain soda or water cracker, rolled rather than ground to dust. Unsalted saltines crushed with a rolling pin are the closest match; panko browns faster and behaves differently.
- Cooking timeNone is given. Half-inch pieces of bass need about 3 to 4 minutes total, until the coating is a deep gold; the fish should reach 145F. Larger blocks are better cut down than fried longer.
- The lemon rubThe recipe has you wipe the fillets with a cut lemon before salting and flouring, which is the usual period treatment for fish and may slightly firm the surface.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. A whole sea bass of 3 to 4 lb, skinned and filleted, will give roughly 1.25 to 1.75 lb of usable fish, enough for about four as a main course. Black sea bass, striped bass or any firm white fillet will do.
- Sauce TartareThe cross-reference is to a mayonnaise-based sauce with capers, pickle and herbs. Any modern tartar sauce stands in; make it before you fry, since the fish will not wait.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller as an advertising cookbook for Cottolene, the shortening sold by N. K. Fairbank & Company, which is why a branded fat appears in the instructions where a plain cookbook would say lard. Cottonseed oil went from industrial by-product to kitchen staple in the last decades of the nineteenth century, marketed hard as cleaner and more economical than lard, and sponsored cookbooks like this one were one of the vehicles for that argument. The dish itself is unremarkable American restaurant and hotel cookery of the period: a firm white fish, twice breaded, deep-fried in a basket and sent out with tartar sauce in a separate boat. The careful garnish of potatoes, parsley and lemon suits the book's Sunday-dinner framing.