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Flounders, Fried
Lay them in salt and water for an hour or more to get rid of the muddy flavour, or rub them well on all sides with salt, which will make the fish firm. Dry them, dip into egg, and cover with bread-crumbs. Fry in oil or boiling fat, and serve on a hot napkin. Garnish with crisped parsley. Time, five to ten minutes to fry. Probable cost, 6d. to 1s.
A straightforward egg-and-crumb fry, but the timings and the serving directions both belong to a kitchen where fish came in whole and dinner arrived on a folded cloth.
- The salt step is the pointThe hour in salt and water is aimed at the estuarine muddiness the book is worried about; the dry salt rub is the alternative the book credits with firming the flesh. Dry the fish thoroughly afterwards or the crumbs will slide off.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means fat hot enough to seize the crumb at once; by modern reckoning that is somewhere around 350-375F. Below that the coating drinks oil; above it the crumbs colour before the fish is set.
- TimingFive to ten minutes suits a whole flounder of a pound or more. Modern supermarket fillets, a quarter-inch thick, need two to three minutes total, and small whole fish four to six. Flounder is lean and turns cottony the moment it overcooks.
- A hot napkinA folded linen napkin laid on the serving dish, warmed, to blot the frying fat. A wire rack over a tray does the job better; if you want the period look, fry first, drain on the rack, then transfer to the napkin at the last moment.
- Crisped parsleyWhole sprigs, bone dry, dropped into the same fat for about 20 to 30 seconds until they stop sizzling and turn brittle and vivid green. Wet parsley will spit violently, so shake it out and pat it before it goes near the pan.
- Oil or fatFrying at this date was commonly done in lard, clarified beef fat or olive oil. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; olive oil is one of the fats the recipe allows, but wants watching.
- Cost and yield"6d. to 1s." is the probable cost given in shillings and pence and tells you only that flounder was cheap. The recipe states no yield; a whole flounder of about 12 oz per person, or two fillets, is a reasonable modern reckoning.
Flounder was one of the cheap estuary fish of Victorian Britain, taken in quantity from the Thames and other tidal rivers and sold for pennies, which is why Cassell's quotes a cost of sixpence to a shilling and spends its first sentence on the muddy flavour rather than on seasoning. Fish that live on soft river bottoms can carry the taste of the mud they feed over, and salting or soaking was often recommended as a household remedy long before refrigeration and distant fisheries made it unnecessary. The egg-and-breadcrumb coating, the frying, the hot napkin and the fried parsley garnish form a fixed formula that recurs across fish entries in books of this period, and each individual entry runs to only a few lines. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, issued in the 1870s and reprinted for decades, was built exactly that way: short alphabetical entries assuming a cook who already knew the method and needed only the particulars.