Perch, Fried
As scales are difficult to remove from perch, dip the fish for a moment or so in scalding water and scale at once. Wash, dry, dip in egg and then in crumbs or flour, and fry in hot fat for ten minutes. Or, they may be stewed in a gravy made of a little stock and a tablespoon of sherry with a seasoning of pepper and salt. PORGIES-Should be in salted water for ten or fifteen minutes, then the heads and tails should be cut off, and the fish rolled in flour or cracker meal, and cooked in a frying-pan in which slices of salt pork have been fried crisply until of a delicate brown.
Two pan-fish treated in the plain nineteenth-century way: dip, coat, fry in whatever fat is at hand. The scalding trick at the start is the part worth keeping.
- The scald is the hingePerch scales are locked in tight and tear the skin if you scrape them dry. A dip of five to ten seconds in water just off the boil loosens them; scale immediately, while the fish is still hot, then rinse in cold water to stop the flesh cooking.
- Ten minutes is too longTen minutes is likely too long -- a whole yellow perch, commonly 4-10 oz, cooks through in roughly 3-4 minutes a side in shallow fat, or 3-4 minutes total at 365F if deep-fried. In a modern skillet ten minutes tends to give a dry fish in a dark crust.
- "Hot fat"Aim for 350-365F. Below that the crumb coating soaks; much above it and the coating colours before the fish is set. Lard, or a neutral oil with a high smoke point, both work.
- Egg and crumbsBeat the egg with a spoonful of water or milk so it coats thinly. Flour first, then egg, then crumbs, gives a coating that stays on; the original's flour-only option is lighter and closer to a plain pan-fry.
- The stewed variantThis is a shallow braise, not a stew: a splash of fish or light chicken stock and a tablespoon of sherry in a covered pan, barely simmering, 5-6 minutes for a whole small fish. Boiling breaks the flesh apart.
- PorgiesPorgy is the same fish sold as scup along the Atlantic coast, usually 1/2 to 1 lb whole. The ten to fifteen minutes in salted water is a short brine -- period books use such soaks to firm and clean the flesh -- and does not need extending.
- Salt porkFry two or three thin slices until crisp and lift them out, leaving the rendered fat to cook the fish. Salt the fish lightly or not at all after a brine, since the pork fat carries plenty.
- YieldReckon one whole perch or porgy per person as a first course, two for a main. Serve straight from the pan with lemon; the crust softens within minutes of standing.
Perch and porgy are pan-fish, the catch of lakes, rivers and inshore water rather than of commercial fleets, and they turn up in American cookbooks as the sort of thing a household cooked because someone had brought it home. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern company that published The Delineator, and like many general household manuals of its date it works through fish species one after another with brief, almost telegraphic notes, assuming the cook already knows how to run a frying-pan. Salt pork is the frying medium called for with the porgies: before commercial cooking oils were cheap and standard, rendered pork fat was a common fat for frying fish. The name porgy is generally traced to a rendering of the Spanish and Portuguese pargo, a sea bream; scup, the other common name, comes from a Narragansett word.