Home › Recipes › Pan-Fried Fish
Pan-Fried Fish
This method is generally used for small fish, or fish steaks. The fish should, of course, be cleaned, then dusted with salt and pepper, and rolled in flour, cornmeal, fine cracker crumbs, or fine bread crumbs. Melt enough Snowdrift in a frying-pan or skillet to barely cover the bottom, and when hot, lay in the fish, browning it first on one side, then on the other, and allowing from ten to twelve minutes for the cookery. Serve with sliced lemon, or any of the sauces enumerated for Broiled or Boiled Fish.
A method rather than a fixed recipe, and it still works exactly as written. The few things worth adjusting are the fat, the pan and the timing for thin fillets.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company and promoted in books like this one. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point substitutes directly: peanut, canola or refined vegetable oil, or clarified butter if you want the flavor.
- "Barely cover the bottom"About 2 to 3 tablespoons in a 10-inch pan. This is shallow frying, not deep frying, and the point of the thin film is that the coating crisps rather than steams.
- Heat before the fish goes inThe instruction to add fish only "when hot" is the hinge of the whole method. The fat should shimmer and a crumb should sizzle immediately; a cool pan means the coating absorbs oil and sticks to the metal.
- Ten to twelve minutesCorrect for whole small fish or steaks three-quarters of an inch to an inch thick. Thin fillets of sole, flounder or tilapia are done in three to five minutes total and will dry out at twelve.
- DonenessFish is cooked at 145F at the thickest point, when the flesh has just turned opaque and separates from the bone. Pull it a shade early; it carries over off the heat.
- The coatingCornmeal gives the sturdiest crust and is the Southern default for pan-fried fish; cracker and bread crumbs brown faster and can scorch. Dredge just before frying, since flour left sitting on damp fish turns pasty.
- Pan and turningCast iron or heavy carbon steel holds heat when cold fish hits it. Turn once only, with a wide slotted spatula, after the first side has fully set and released.
- ServingFigure one whole small fish or one steak per person, roughly 6 to 8 ounces. Drain briefly on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
Snowdrift was one of the flagship products of the American cottonseed-oil industry, and this book exists to sell it: a manufacturer's cookbook of the sort issued in large numbers in the first decades of the twentieth century, when vegetable shortenings were competing with lard and butter for a place in the household kitchen. That commercial purpose shows in the writing, which is otherwise a clear statement of standard practice. Pan-fried fish in cornmeal is older than any branded fat, and is generally traced in the American South to the abundance of both catfish and cornmeal; the recipe's willingness to substitute flour, cracker crumbs or bread crumbs reflects a period when cooks used whatever dry starch the pantry held. The cross-reference to "sauces enumerated for Broiled or Boiled Fish" is a reminder that these books were designed to be read whole, each recipe leaning on the others.