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Fried Bass with Bacon
Wash, scale and carefully clean the bass, season well with pepper and salt, roll them in flour and let them lie in it until ready to be cooked, then drop into a pan of very hot lard and fry until nicely browned. Then fry in a separate pan four slices of streaky bacon; one piece for each piece of the fish and lay the slices of bacon one on each piece of fish. Garnish with parsley and serve with mashed potatoes.
A plain pan-fry from Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen, written for cooks who already knew how to handle a fish. The gaps worth filling are the fat, the fish size and the temperature.
- Fish size and yieldFour pieces of fish are implied by the four bacon slices, so the dish presumably serves four. Small whole bass of about 3/4 to 1 lb each, or thick fillets of 6-8 oz, both suit this treatment; larger whole fish will brown before the interior sets.
- Lard, and how much"A pan of very hot lard" most likely indicates shallow frying rather than deep: about 1/4 inch in a heavy skillet. Lard is still sold and gives the cleanest flavour, but any fat with a high smoke point works. Bring it to 350-375F, hot enough that a corner of the fish sizzles immediately.
- Streaky baconStreaky is what an American shopper simply calls bacon. Any standard cured side bacon is correct.
- Flour restingLetting the floured fish "lie in it until ready to be cooked" is deliberate. The flour draws surface moisture and hydrates into a thin paste that fries into a crust instead of a dusty coating. Ten to twenty minutes is enough.
- DonenessFish is done at an internal 145F, roughly 3-4 minutes per side for fillets. Judge by the flesh turning opaque and separating at the flake rather than by colour alone, since the flour browns faster than the fish cooks.
- Order of operationsFry the bacon first, not second, and hold it warm. That leaves the fish going straight from pan to plate, and you can fry it in a spoonful of the bacon fat added to the lard.
- Seasoning the flourModern practice is to season the flour rather than the fish, which distributes salt and pepper more evenly and keeps the surface dry. The result is the same.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is less a collection of inventions than a working inventory of what a large American hotel kitchen turned out daily -- which is why a dish this plain sits alongside elaborate entrees. The recipe specifies only "bass," and pairing lean white fish with a slice of fried bacon is often described as an old American kitchen habit: the bacon supplies the fat and salt the fish lacks, and the rendered drippings flavour the pan. Frying in lard was simply the default before industrial vegetable shortenings took hold in the 1910s. The mashed potatoes and parsley are the fixed hotel garnish of the era, recurring among the book's fish entries with no further comment.