Fried Fish
Clean thoroughly, cut off the head, and, if large, cut out the backbone, and slice the body crosswise into five or six pieces; dip in Indian meal or wheat flour, or in a beaten egg, and then in bread crumbs (trout and perch should never be dipped in meal), put into a thick-bottomed skillet, skin side uppermost, with hot lard or drippings (never in butter, as it takes out the sweetness and gives a bad color), fry slowly, and turn when a light brown. The roe and the backbone, if previously removed, may be cut up and fried with the other pieces. A better way is to dredge the pieces in the flour, brush with beaten egg, roll in bread-crumbs, and fry in hot lard tor drippings enough to completely cover them. If the fat is very hot, the fish will not absorb it, and will be delicately cooked. When brown on one side, turn over in the fat and brown the other, and when done let them drain. Slices of large fish may be cooked in the same way. Serve with tomatoe sauce or slices of lemon.
A general method rather than a fixed recipe, covering both shallow and deep frying. Two details carry most of the weight: fat temperature and the choice of coating.
- Indian mealCornmeal, not a mix. Fine or medium grind gives a gritty crust. The recipe excludes trout and perch from the meal without saying why; flour or crumbs are the alternatives it offers.
- Lard or drippingsEither works and both take heat well. The objection to butter is sound as written for a long fry, since milk solids scorch below the temperature you want; clarified butter or a neutral oil behaves like the lard.
- Fat temperature"Very hot" for the deep-fried version means 350-375F. Below about 325F the coating soaks fat instead of setting, which is exactly the sogginess the recipe is warning against. Fry in batches so the temperature does not crash.
- "Fry slowly" in the skilletFor the shallow method the fat should be hot enough to sizzle on contact but the pan kept at medium, so a thick cross-cut steak cooks through before the meal burns. A thick-bottomed pan matters here; thin pans give scorched spots.
- Cross-cut piecesSlicing a whole fish crosswise into five or six pieces produces bone-in steaks whose thickness depends on the fish; at about an inch they need roughly 3-4 minutes a side, and boneless fillets of the same thickness 2-3 minutes a side. Fish is cooked at 145F internal, when the flesh flakes and turns opaque at the bone.
- Turn onceSet the coating fully on the first side before moving anything. Repeated flipping is what tears breading off fish.
- The roeThe recipe cuts it up and fries it with the fish; roe cooks faster than the flesh, so coat it the same way and give it less time, or fry it separately.
- DrainingDrain on a rack rather than paper if you have one, and salt immediately out of the fat. Piled on a plate, the underside steams and softens.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; a whole fish of 2-3 lb treated this way would serve three or four with the tomato sauce or lemon.
Buckeye Cookery (first issued in 1876) came out of Ohio, and its fish chapter reflects inland cooking, naming trout and perch. The choice offered between cornmeal and a flour-egg-crumb coating is marked in the text as "a better way." The insistence on lard or drippings over butter is not fussiness but economy and chemistry together: rendered pork fat was the cheap frying medium in a Midwestern household and it tolerated heat that butter could not. Tomato sauce as an accompaniment places the recipe in the period when tomatoes had become thoroughly domestic in American cooking, no longer a suspect novelty.