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Fried Slices of Fish with Tomato Sauce
Bone and slice the fish, and cut it into even slices; or if a flounder or any flat fish is used, begin at the tail and, keeping the knife close to the bone, separate each side of the fish neatly from it, then cut each side in two lengthwise, leaving the fish in four long pieces. Remove the skin carefully. After having sprinkled pepper and salt over them, roll each piece first in sifted cracker or bread crumbs, then in half a cup of milk mixed with an egg, and then in the crumbs again.
They are better fried in a saute pan in a little hot butter; yet they may be sauted in a little hot lard, with some neat slices of pork, or fried in boiling lard. Pour tomato sauce on a hot platter, arrange the pieces of fish symmetrically on it, and serve immediately.
A straightforward breaded fish fillet, written for cooks who expected to fillet the fish themselves. The only real technical points are the breading order and the fat.
- Filleting a flat fishThe instruction to start at the tail and keep the knife against the bone is still how a flounder is filleted; cutting each side lengthwise in two simply separates the thick and thin halves along the central line. Four fillets from one flounder is normal. A fishmonger will do this, but ask for the skin left on so the fillets hold together until you remove it.
- Breading sequenceCrumb, then egg-and-milk, then crumb again. Starting with dry crumbs on wet fish is unusual by modern habit, where flour comes first, and it works for the same reason: the dry layer gives the egg something to grip. If the fish is very damp, blot it well or substitute flour for that first coat.
- Cracker crumbs"Sifted cracker crumbs" means plain unsalted soda or water crackers pounded and sieved fine. Saltines are the nearest supermarket equivalent; reduce the added salt if you use them.
- Egg wash quantityHalf a cup of milk with one egg is enough for four to six fillets. Beat it thoroughly or the egg streaks and the crumbs stick unevenly.
- The fatButter in a saute pan is the recommendation and it browns the crumbs best, but it burns; clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds up better. "Boiling lard" does not mean literally boiling. The recipe gives no temperature; the usual modern equivalent for deep fat is somewhere around 350-375F.
- Slices of porkThe pork here is most likely thin slices of salt pork or fat back, fried alongside to render fat; the recipe does not say what became of it, though "neat slices" suggests it was meant to be presentable on the platter. Bacon is the practical stand-in, though it is smoked and sweeter than salt pork was.
- Cooking timeFillets a half-inch thick need about two to three minutes a side. The fish is done when it flakes at the thickest point; anything longer and the flesh tightens and weeps.
- ServingThe sauce goes under the fish, not over it, so the crumb crust stays crisp. Have the tomato sauce made and the platter hot before the fish goes into the pan. Four fillets serve two to three.
Breaded and fried fish over a pool of tomato sauce belongs to the late nineteenth-century American cook's standard repertoire, when tinned and bottled tomatoes had made a tomato sauce a year-round rather than a late-summer possibility. The book was written for households buying whole fish, which is why so much of the instruction here is butchery rather than cookery: the reader was expected to bone a flounder before she could fry it. Egg-and-crumb coating is close to what French kitchens called pane a l'anglaise, though that method takes flour first, then egg, then crumbs, rather than crumbing twice. Note too the casual choice among butter, lard and salt pork -- fat was selected by what was in the house, and the author's preference for butter is offered as a refinement rather than a rule.