Perch, Fried
INGREDIENTS.-Egg and bread-crumbs, hot lard.
Scale and clean the fish, brush it over with egg, and cover with bread-crumbs.
THE PERCH.
Have ready some boiling lard; put the fish in, and fry a nice brown. Serve with plain melted butter or anchovy sauce.
TIME.-10 minutes.
PHEASANT.
Petites Bouchées. - INGREDIENTS for moderate-sized dish.-6 oz. of sweet almonds, 1/4 lb. of sifted sugar, the rind of 1/24 lemon, the white of 1 egg, puff-paste. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Blanch the almonds and chop them fine; rub the sugar on the lemon-rind and pound it in a mortar; mix this with the almonds and the white of the egg. Roll some puffpaste out; cut it in any shape that may be preferred, such as diamonds, rings, ovals, &c., and spread the above mixture over the paste. Bake the bouchées in an oven, not too hot, and serve cold.
TIME. hour, or rather more.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Petits Fours. INGREDIENTS. - Sponge or pound cake, icing of any kind, crystallized fruit, pistachio nuts, candied peel.
These pretty little cakes, so dear to buy, and so useful for supper or dessert dishes, may easily be made at home. The simplest way to make them is to cut stale pound or sponge cake in even slices, then to cut it in fancy shapes, to cover them with icing, and to ornament them as taste may direct with the garnishes named above; or with sweetmeats, blanched almonds, or angelica, the latter looking well set as leaves to small bright-coloured fruit, such as a cherry on white icing; or pink blanched almonds and chopped pistachio nuts look pretty.
A plain egg-and-crumb fry for whole perch, of the kind that assumes a fishmonger has done nothing for you and that a deep pan of lard is standing ready.
- Scale before anything elsePerch scales are small, hard and firmly set, and they will not come off once the fish is crumbed. Scale under cold running water working tail to head, and take care with the spiny dorsal fin, which is genuinely sharp.
- Fat and temperature"Boiling lard" means fat hot enough to sizzle on contact, roughly 350-375F. Any neutral frying fat works; lard gives the crispest crust. Too cool and the crumb coating absorbs fat instead of setting.
- Depth of fatThe recipe says nothing about how much fat, only that it should be boiling. In practice an inch in a deep, heavy pan is enough for perch of 6-8 oz, which lets the fish be turned once.
- The ten minutesTen minutes suits whole perch of about half a pound, turned at the halfway mark. Fillets need 3-4 minutes total. The fish is done when the flesh at the thickest part lifts clean from the backbone.
- Dry the fishThe instruction to brush with egg and crumb works only on a dry surface. Pat the fish thoroughly with cloth or paper first, or the coating slides in the pan.
- Melted butter, Victorian sense"Plain melted butter" in Beeton is not simply butter melted but a thin flour-thickened butter sauce. Anchovy sauce is the same base with anchovy essence stirred through; a modern anchovy butter or a bought anchovy sauce serves the same purpose.
- YieldOne whole perch per person, two if they are small. Serve at once; crumbed fried fish loses its crust within a few minutes of leaving the pan.
Perch was a freshwater fish of English rivers and ponds rather than a market commodity, and Beeton treats it briefly and pairs it with anchovy sauce, a sauce often served with mild-flavoured fish in the period. The household books of the period assumed a cook who might be handed whatever the local water yielded, and the egg-and-breadcrumb fry was the default treatment for any small whole fish of firm white flesh, from perch to smelts to whiting. Deep frying in lard was ordinary domestic practice well before commercial vegetable shortenings arrived, and a large pan of clarified fat was kept and reused for the purpose. Perch is still eaten enthusiastically in continental Europe, particularly around the Swiss and Italian lakes, but it largely dropped out of British cooking as fish supply shifted to sea species landed by trawler.