Home › The Principles of Cookery › FISH, FRIED (Jewish fashion)
FISH, FRIED (Jewish fashion)
The Jews, like our Continental neighbours, use oil for frying instead of lard. Soyer gives the following excellent recipe for cooking fish. Lay one or more pounds of halibut in a dish, with salt over the top, and water not to cover the fish. Let it stay one hour for the salt to penetrate. Drain and dry it; then cut out the bone, and take off the fins. Divide the pieces into slices half an inch thick. Put a quarter of a pound of oil, butter, or dripping into a frying-pan. Dip the fish into a batter, and fry till the pieces are of a nice colour, and all sides alike. When quite done, take them out with a slicer, drain, and serve with any sauce liked. All fish, especially those containing oil, are improved by this method--the oil is absorbed by the batter.
A plain method with two useful ideas in it: a short dry-salting to firm the flesh, and a batter that seals the fish rather than letting it steep in fat. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to make a frying batter.
- The salting is the hingeAn hour under salt draws water from the halibut and firms the flesh so the slices hold together in the pan. Drain and dry the fish thoroughly afterwards, or the batter will slide off. Rinse briefly if you are wary of salinity, since a pound of fish under a blanket of salt takes up a good deal.
- "Water not to cover the fish"This is a shallow brine, not a soak: enough liquid to dissolve the salt into the underside, with the top of the fish left above the water and salted.
- A quarter of a pound of oilFat was sold and reckoned by weight. A quarter pound is roughly half a cup of oil, or a stick of butter. In a small pan that gives shallow-frying depth, not deep-frying.
- Oil, butter, or drippingThe three are not interchangeable here. The whole point of frying fish in oil in a Jewish kitchen is that oil is neutral under the dietary laws, so the fish can be served at a meat meal or a dairy one; beef dripping and butter each foreclose one of those. As printed, the recipe offers all three without remark. Oil also tolerates a higher temperature than butter.
- The batterNo batter is given. A plain one of flour, water or beer and a little salt is in keeping with the period; a beaten egg with flour and matzo meal or fine breadcrumbs is the more traditionally Anglo-Jewish coating and holds up better when the fish is eaten cold.
- Heat and timingBring the oil to about 350-375F before the first piece goes in. Half-inch slices of halibut need roughly two to three minutes a side; the fish is done when the batter is set and coloured, and pushing past that dries out a lean white fish quickly.
- SlicerA fish slice, meaning a broad flat spatula, not a knife. Drain on a rack rather than on paper if you plan to eat the fish cold, so the underside does not go soft.
- Yield and servingA pound of halibut serves two as a main course or four as a first course. Fried fish in this style is as often eaten cold as hot, with vinegar, a sharp sauce, or nothing at all.
Fried fish in the "Jewish fashion" reaches English cookery books through the Sephardi communities that settled in London from the later seventeenth century, who brought with them the Iberian habit of frying fish in oil and eating it cold. Because it was cooked in advance and needed no reheating, it suited the Sabbath, when no fire could be lit, and because oil is neither meat nor milk, the dish could go on any table. English writers noticed it early: Hannah Glasse gives a version in the eighteenth century, and the cold fried fish sold from London stalls in the nineteenth is generally traced to the same source, which is why it is often named as one half of the ancestry of fish and chips. Alexis Soyer, cited here, was chef at the Reform Club and the most publicly visible cook in Victorian Britain, and his interest in cheap, portable, well-made food ran through everything from his famine kitchens in Ireland to his campaign cooking in the Crimea. Cassell's borrows his recipe wholesale, presenting butter and dripping as alternatives to the oil alongside it.