Fillets of Fish
Serve Cut any fish into slices about one inch thick, wash quickly, and wipe dry. Sprinkle a platter with chopped onion, lay the fillets on top of this, and dust with salt and pepper. Mix three tablespoonfuls of olive oil with one tablespoonful of vinegar, moisten the fish thoroughly with this, and stand aside one or two hours. When ready to cook dip the fillets first in egg, and then in bread crumbs, and fry in hot fat. Garnish with lettuce or cress and quarters of lemon.
A straightforward marinated-and-breaded fry, written when "fillet" still meant any thick boneless slice rather than the side of a fish. The marinade is the point: an hour or two in oil, vinegar and onion is what separates this from plain fried fish.
- What a "fillet" means hereThe instruction to cut slices an inch thick describes steaks or thick chunks cut from a large fish — cod, halibut, haddock, swordfish — not the thin flatfish fillets sold under that name today. If you use thin fillets, cut the marinating time to about 30 minutes and the frying time to two or three minutes a side.
- Marinate coldThe recipe says only to stand the fish aside for one or two hours and does not say where; refrigerate it, and let the fish sit out 15 minutes before breading so it does not chill the fat.
- The marinade proportionsThree tablespoons oil to one of vinegar is a standard vinaigrette ratio. The recipe names no weight of fish; four tablespoons of dressing is only enough to moisten a pound or two, so scale it up rather than extending the soak.
- Dry before breadingLift the slices out and blot them. Oil-slicked fish sheds egg wash, and egg that will not grip means crumbs that fall off in the pan. Season the crumbs as well as the fish.
- "Hot fat" is 350-375F"Hot fat" -- The original names no fat and no temperature. Half an inch of a neutral oil at 350-375F gives an even brown in three to four minutes a side; below 325F the crumb coat absorbs fat and slides.
- DonenessCook to 145F at the centre — the flesh should just flake and look opaque. An inch-thick steak takes six to eight minutes total.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; reckon on one thick slice a person, so about four servings from 1½ lb. Serve promptly; the coating softens within a few minutes of leaving the pan.
Hot Weather Dishes is by Mrs. Sarah Tyson Rorer of the Philadelphia Cooking School, one of a number of late-Victorian summer cookery books aimed at households trying to feed themselves without a coal range roaring all day. The logic of this recipe is seasonal: the fish does most of its work sitting quietly in oil, vinegar and onion, and the actual cooking is a few minutes in a skillet rather than an hour in an oven. Acid and oil have a long history as a way of holding fish in warm weather; here the treatment is kept short enough only to season and firm it. Garnishing with lettuce, cress and lemon quarters rather than a hot sauce is the other summer tell.