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Perch, Fried
Wash, scale, and clean the fish carefully, wipe them dry, and flour them lightly all over; then rub off the flour, dip them into beaten egg, and afterwards into finely-grated bread-crumbs, and fry them in plenty of boiling fat, until they are nicely browned. Drain them for a few minutes on an inverted sieve, serve on a hot dish, and garnish with parsley. Send shrimp sauce, anchovy sauce, or plain melted butter, to table in a tureen. Time to fry, according to their size. Probable cost, uncertain, perch being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient, four or five for a dish.
A standard Victorian treatment for a small whole freshwater fish, and it still works. Two things in the text will mislead a modern reader: the flouring step and the phrase "melted butter".
- "Rub off the flour"This is not a mistake. The point is to leave only the thinnest film of flour on damp skin so the egg grips instead of sliding off. A heavy flour coat under egg and crumb turns pasty in the fat.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn this period melted butter means a thickened butter sauce -- roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in an ounce of butter, let down with water or fish stock to a pouring consistency. Plain liquid butter poured over fried fish is not what is meant.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means fat at frying heat, in the region of 350-375F. Fat is not actually boiling at these temperatures; the bubbling is water leaving the food. Too cool and the crumb absorbs grease; too hot and it colours before the fish is set.
- Time to fryThe book declines to give one. For perch of 6-8 oz, 4 to 6 minutes total in deep fat, turning once if not submerged; the flesh should be opaque at the backbone. Larger fish are better scored twice on each side so the thickest part cooks through.
- Cleaning perchPerch scales are notoriously tight and the dorsal fin is sharply spined. Trim the dorsal with scissors before scaling, and work from tail to head; some cooks dip the fish in near-boiling water for a few seconds to loosen the scales.
- "Inverted sieve"A wire rack or a colander turned upside down over a tray. The purpose is air on all sides -- draining on a flat plate or on paper alone steams the underside soft.
- SourcingThe note on cost still holds: European perch is rarely sold commercially. American yellow perch fillets are widely available frozen and take the same egg-and-crumb coating, though they will fry in about 3 minutes.
- YieldFour or five whole perch serve four as a first course, or two to three as a main with potatoes.
Perch appears in Victorian cookery books largely as an angler's fish rather than a fishmonger's one, which is why the book cannot quote a price -- perch were caught in English rivers, lakes and canals and eaten by the household that caught them. The egg-and-breadcrumb frying method given here was a common nineteenth-century treatment for small firm-fleshed fish, and the choice of accompaniments -- shrimp sauce, anchovy sauce, or thickened melted butter -- fits the period's general preference for sending something saline and liquid to table separately in a tureen with fried freshwater fish. Izaak Walton had praised perch in The Compleat Angler two centuries earlier, and the fish kept a reputation for firm white flesh.