Fried Flounders
Clean, dry, and score across but do not cut them in pieces. Roll in flour, drop in very hot lard or bacon fat and cook till brown. Serve with anchovy or tartare sauce.
A three-line recipe that assumes you know your way around a skillet of hot fat. The two things the original leaves out are the temperature of the fat and the seasoning of the flour.
- Fat temperatureThe original says only "very hot" and gives no number; for flour-dredged fish something in the region of 350-375F is the usual modern target. Cooler than that and the coating tends to absorb fat and slide off; hotter and the flour can scorch before the flesh at the bone is set.
- Why score itFlounder is a flatfish cooked whole here, and the flesh at the thick centre ridge sets long after the thin edges. The recipe's "score across" means two or three cuts through the skin toward the bone, which let heat in and help stop the fish curling in the pan.
- Size and yieldNothing in the text specifies a size, but a fish cooked whole in a skillet implies a pan-sized flounder, perhaps 3/4 to 1 lb, one per person. Larger fish are easier filleted than fried whole in a domestic pan.
- Season the flourThe recipe says only "roll in flour." Salt and pepper the flour generously; salt applied after frying sits on the crust and falls off. Pat the fish genuinely dry first, as the instruction to dry it is what makes the flour adhere.
- Fat choiceLard and bacon fat both work, and bacon fat gives the fish a distinctly smoky edge. Use a fat that will hold frying heat without smoking; butter alone will not.
- DonenessSix to eight minutes total for a pan-sized fish, turned once. The flesh should lift cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point; flounder is lean and goes dry and cottony within a minute or two of that.
- The saucesAnchovy sauce in a book of this date is a butter or cream sauce sharpened with anchovy essence, not a bottled fish sauce. Tartare sauce is mayonnaise with capers, gherkins and herbs, and is the easier of the two to make now.
Frying a whole flatfish in rendered pork fat is long-established American skillet cookery, and the Butterick book -- issued by the pattern company as part of its household publishing -- presents it with the brevity of something its readers were assumed to know. The sauces help date the entry: anchovy sauce and tartare sauce were familiar accompaniments to fried fish in English and French service and appear widely in cookbooks of this period. The direction to use "lard or bacon fat" also fits a kitchen working before commercial vegetable shortening and bottled oils were in general use.