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Fried Black Bass
Scale and clean the requisite number of black bass, roll well in flour, put in a fryingpan with hot fat to about half their height and fry until done. Place on a dish, garnish with potatoes, slices of lemon, parsley, and serve.
A pan-fried whole fish stripped to essentials: flour, hot fat, lemon. The only real variables are the depth of the fat and the size of the fish.
- Fat depth and temperature"Half their height" means shallow-frying, not deep-frying — an inch or so of fat for a pan-sized bass. The fat wants to be hot but not smoking, in the region of 350F; much cooler and the flour coat absorbs grease instead of setting.
- Which fatThe recipe specifies only "hot fat"; lard, clarified butter, or a blend would all have been to hand in a kitchen of this date. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; clarified butter avoids the scorching of whole butter.
- Fish size"The requisite number" implies small whole fish, one per person — a pan-dressed bass of roughly a pound. Anything much larger will burn outside before the spine is done; fillet it, or finish it in a moderate oven.
- Dry the fish firstThe instruction to "roll well in flour" only works on a surface blotted dry. Wet skin turns the flour to paste, which slides off in the fat. Season the fish, not just the flour.
- Judging doneness"Until done" is about 4–6 minutes a side for a 1 lb fish. The flesh at the thickest point behind the head should be opaque and pull cleanly from the bone; 145F is the recommended safe internal temperature.
- Turn onceLet the crust set fully before moving the fish — three or four minutes undisturbed — then turn once with a wide spatula. Repeated flipping is what tears the skin.
- The garnish"Garnish with potatoes" here most likely means fried or boiled potatoes served alongside rather than a decoration. Lemon and parsley are the only accompaniments the recipe names.
- Scaling and cleaningA fishmonger will scale and gut to order. If doing it yourself, scale under running water or in a sink of water — dry scaling scatters them across the kitchen.
Black bass — largemouth and smallmouth — were freshwater game fish, and their appearance on a New York hotel menu reflects the late nineteenth-century American appetite for native river and lake fish supplied by inland shippers on ice. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, is full of these one-paragraph entries: they were written for cooks who already knew how to fry a fish and needed only to know how the house wanted it sent out, which is why the plating instruction (potatoes, lemon, parsley) is as detailed as the cooking. The coating here is flour only, without egg or crumb.