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Fried Fish (Marinade halibut steaks)
Marinade 4 halibut steaks for 1 hour; drain, dip in salted flour, then in beaten egg, lastly in fine salted and peppered crumbs. Leave on ice for 1 hour, and fry in hot Crisco.
A terse entry from a promotional cookbook that assumes you already know the house marinade and the state of a deep-fat kettle. The hinge is the hour on ice: it sets the crumb coat so it does not slide off in the fat.
- What the marinade isThe recipe assumes a marinade given elsewhere in the book. Period fish marinades were generally acidulated: oil with lemon juice or vinegar, often with sliced onion, parsley, salt and pepper; proportions varied from book to book. An hour is plenty for halibut; longer and the acid begins to firm and whiten the surface of the flesh.
- Salted flourSimply all-purpose flour seasoned with salt, about a teaspoon per cup. The three-stage flour-egg-crumb coating is standard breading; the flour layer exists to give the egg something to grip on wet fish.
- Fine crumbsThese are dried white breadcrumbs sieved fine, not panko and not the soft fresh crumbs used in stuffings. Panko will work but browns faster and gives a coarser jacket than the recipe intends.
- The hour on iceDo not skip it. Chilling firms the egg and sets the crumbs against the fish, which is the difference between a coating that fries intact and one that blisters loose. A rack in the refrigerator does the same job as the old icebox.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco was then a firm hydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold as a clean-tasting alternative to lard for deep frying. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point — peanut, canola, sunflower — behaves the same way here.
- How hot is hotThe recipe says only "hot" and gives no figure. For breaded fish a fat temperature in the region of 350-375F is the usual modern target: much cooler and the crumbs soak, much hotter and they colour before the centre of a thick steak is done.
- TimingHalibut steaks around an inch thick need roughly 4 to 5 minutes total in the fat, turning once if they are not submerged. Halibut is lean and turns dry and cottony quickly; standard food-safety guidance for fish is 145F internal, and some cooks prefer to take it out a little short of that.
- YieldFour steaks serve four. Lemon and a tartare or anchovy sauce are the period accompaniments.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company launched in 1911; the book's job was to supply a full year of menus in which the new fat did the work formerly done by lard and butter. That explains the last four words of this recipe, which are the only part of it the publisher really cared about. The technique itself is older than Crisco uliquor, then flour, egg and crumb before frying uliquor and had been standard in English and American cookery for fish long before the shortening existed. Halibut steaks were a sensible choice for a mass-market book of the 1910s: firm, easy to portion, and widely landed on both coasts.