Broiled Salmon
Cut six slices of salmon, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in beaten eggs and roll in corn meal. Place in a spider, cook both sides quickly. Drain and lay them in a dish. Garnish them with a few pieces of lemon dipped in parsley chopped fine and some eggs fried in oil.
A pan-fried fish supper filed under "broiled," which in older American usage covered cooking over or in direct contact with fierce heat. Nothing here is difficult; the whole dish turns on high heat and short cooking.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally one standing on legs over coals. A heavy cast-iron or carbon-steel skillet is the direct equivalent, and it should be well preheated before the fish goes in.
- Corn meal, not cornstarch"Corn meal" here is ordinary yellow or white cornmeal, and a medium or fine grind coats best. Coarse stone-ground meal will fall away from the egg unless you press it on firmly and let the slices rest a few minutes before frying.
- The slicesThe recipe does not specify thickness or weight; six slices simply means six portions, steaks or fillet pieces. Uniform thickness matters more than shape: thin tail pieces will be dry before the coating colours.
- "Cook both sides quickly"This is the hinge. Three to four minutes a side in a hot pan with enough fat to sizzle is plenty. Many cooks take salmon off at 125-130F at the centre; the USDA recommendation is 145F, above which it turns dry and chalky. The instruction to work quickly is about the fish, not the cook's convenience.
- Fat for fryingThe recipe never specifies a fat for the fish, though frying in a spider implies one. Use a neutral oil with a high smoke point, or clarified butter; whole butter will brown and burn before the cornmeal crust sets.
- Eggs fried in oilThe garnish is fried eggs, cooked in shallow hot oil until the whites are set. The recipe says only "some eggs," giving neither a number nor a placement on the dish.
- Lemon and parsleyLemon wedges or thick half-slices are dipped cut-side down in finely chopped parsley so the herb sticks. Do this at the last moment or the parsley wilts and darkens.
- YieldSix servings as written, and the dish does not hold. Serve straight from the pan; a cornmeal crust goes soft within minutes of draining.
Cornmeal-crusted fried fish is one of the oldest and most widespread cooking habits in American kitchens, common wherever cornmeal was the everyday dry good and a skillet the everyday pan, and it was applied to whatever the local water yielded. The title "broiled" for a pan-fried dish is not an error but an older sense of the word, which described cooking by fierce direct heat rather than the specific method a modern range implies. The fried-egg garnish was itself common in nineteenth-century fish cookery.