Brook Trout
Wash, dry, flour, salt and pepper them, and place in a hot pan in which there are hot pork drippings or lard. If lard is used put in a small piece of butter to prevent their sticking to the pan. Fry, turning the fish when one side is browned to the the other, and serve with slices of lemon.
A bare-bones pan-fry that assumes you have small whole fish, a heavy pan and rendered pork fat on hand. The gaps are in quantities and doneness, both easy to fill.
- Size and quantityBrook trout are small fish, generally cleaned and cooked whole. Figure one or two per person, and keep to smaller fish if you want them to cook through at the same rate the skin browns.
- The fatPork drippings means fat rendered from salt pork or bacon. Lard works; so does clarified butter with a spoon of bacon fat. The original adds "a small piece of butter" to the lard for the stated purpose of keeping the fish from sticking to the pan.
- Flour, salt, pepper — in that orderThe text lists flouring before seasoning, but season the fish first and flour last, immediately before it goes in the pan. Flour left sitting on a damp fish turns to paste and will not crisp.
- Dry means dryThis is the hinge. Pat the trout thoroughly inside and out with a towel; residual water steams under the flour and the skin will stick and tear when you turn it. Do not crowd the pan for the same reason.
- Heat and timingMedium-high, fat shimmering but not smoking. A 10-inch trout needs roughly 4 minutes on the first side and 3 on the second. Turn once only, with a wide spatula, and check the thickest part behind the head: the flesh should be opaque and lift cleanly from the backbone, about 145F.
- ServingLemon slices are the whole sauce, and the fish wants nothing else. If you want to extend it, pour the browned pan fat over the fish at the table.
Brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) is a native eastern North American char, and through the nineteenth century it was less a market fish than a fish you or someone you knew had caught that morning. The pairing with pork fat is old camp and farmhouse practice: salt pork traveled, kept, and was often the only cooking fat in a fishing shanty. By the early twentieth century, hatchery stocking and the rise of rainbow trout were already changing what appeared on the plate.