To Pan Fish
Dry fish, rub in flour which has been seasoned with salt and pepper, and fry in a frying-pan in a small amount of fat.
A method rather than a recipe: this is the basic flour-dredge pan fry, and the Butterick book assumes you know what size fish and how long. The points below fill in what it leaves out.
- "Pan fish" means small whole fish"Pan fish" -- In American usage a pan fish is one that fits a frying pan whole — perch, crappie, bluegill, small trout, smelt. The heading here, though, is probably the verb: to "pan" fish is to fry it in a pan, and the instruction is given for fish in general. The method works equally for fillets under about an inch thick.
- Dry the fish properlyThis is the hinge. Flour on a wet surface goes to paste and the coating slides off in the pan. Blot both sides with paper towel, and for whole fish dry the cavity too.
- Seasoned flour proportionsThe book gives none. About 1 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper to a cup of flour is the usual ratio; dredge just before frying, as flour left sitting on fish turns pasty.
- "A small amount of fat"Roughly 1/8 inch in the pan — enough to come partway up the fish, not to float it. In 1911 this would have been lard, drippings or salt-pork fat; clarified butter, or a neutral oil with a knob of butter added late, gives the same result.
- Heat before the fish goes inThe fat should shimmer and a pinch of flour should sizzle at once, around 350–365F. Below that the coating absorbs fat and greys instead of browning.
- TimingThree to four minutes a side for a whole pan fish, two to three for a thin fillet. Turn once only. Fish is done at 145F, or when the flesh parts from the backbone with a fork.
- Don't crowd the panTwo small fish at a time in a 10-inch skillet. More than that drops the fat temperature and the fish steams in its own liquid.
- YieldFigure one 8-ounce whole pan fish or a 6-ounce fillet per person, served immediately with lemon; the crust softens within minutes of leaving the pan.
Flour-dredged pan frying is among the plainest treatments of freshwater fish in American cookery, and its appearance here in a single bare sentence suggests the Butterick editors expected readers to have done it already. The Butterick Cook Book (1911), issued by the pattern company as part of a broad line of household manuals aimed at the same women who bought its dress patterns, gives more of its fish chapter to the more ambitious preparations — boiled, baked, moulded, sauced — and files this method under things one simply needs stated once. The dish belongs to the era when small panfish were as often caught as bought. The flour coat browns to a crust on delicate flesh that overcooks quickly.