Fried Perch
Select fresh perch of medium size. Clean, bone and wipe dry as possible. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, dip in flour, egg, and crumbs (be sure fish are well coated with crumbs). Lay three at a time in a croquette basket and fry a golden brown in deep hot Cottolene. Cottolene should not be so hot as to brown fish at once, as fish will not be cooked through. (Time required for frying small fish is from four to six minutes.) Drain on brown paper and serve with Sauce Tartare. Garnish with parsley, lemon slices and radishes cut to imitate roses.
A straightforward deep-fry, but two things in it date the page: the fat and the fish itself. Everything else translates directly.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, heavily advertised from the late 1880s and 1890s and long gone from shelves. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil works — peanut, canola or refined sunflower.
- Fat temperatureThe instruction not to have the fat hot enough to brown the fish at once is the hinge of the recipe. Aim for about 350°F; at 375°F and above a small panfish colours before the flesh sets, and at much below 325°F the crumbs drink oil. Use a thermometer rather than the old bread-cube test.
- Croquette basketA small wire basket with a long handle, used to lower and lift a few pieces at once. A modern fryer basket, a spider or a slotted spoon does the same job. Frying three at a time is not fussiness — crowding drops the oil temperature.
- BoningPerch are bony and the recipe assumes you will bone them before breading. Butterflying the fish off the backbone is one approach; pin bones can be pulled with tweezers. Thin boned fish may cook faster than the stated four to six minutes, so check early.
- Wipe dryWorth taking seriously. Flour will not adhere to a wet fish, and the coating slides off in the oil. Dry, flour, egg, crumb — and let the breaded fish sit a few minutes before frying so the crust sets.
- Brown paperGrocers' paper, used the way we use paper towels. A rack set over a tray drains better and keeps the underside crisp.
- Sauce TartareIn this period, a mayonnaise base with chopped capers, gherkins, parsley and often shallot or onion. The book expects you to find the sauce elsewhere in its pages.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Three fish per basketful and one or two whole boned perch per person is a reasonable reading for a Sunday dinner course.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the makers of Cottolene, and the repeated brand name in the frying instructions is the point of the book: it is a cookery collection built to argue that cottonseed shortening should replace lard in American kitchens. The argument caught on, and the descendants of that campaign — Crisco chief among them — reshaped what home cooks fried in for most of the twentieth century. The fish itself is a freshwater dinner, yellow perch being abundant in the Great Lakes and inland rivers and cheap enough to appear on a family menu without ceremony. The garnish of radishes cut to imitate roses belongs to the same era's enthusiasm for carved vegetable work, which appears often in turn-of-the-century household manuals.