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Fried Flounders
Clean and prepare as for boiling some small fish, score them over the back and sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip them into milk and cover well with flour; or dip them in egg and breadcrumbs, put them into a fryingpan of hot fat and fry for four minutes, then bring the fat to the boil and fry for three minutes longer. Take them out, drain and dust over with a little salt; garnish with halves of lemon and fried parsley and serve on a hot dish.
A plain shallow-fry of whole small flatfish, with one instruction that will read oddly to a modern cook: fat does not boil.
- "Bring the fat to the boil"This is the hinge of the recipe. The book gives no temperatures, and fat does not literally boil; the phrase is best read as an instruction to raise the heat sharply for the last stage, after the fish has cooked through, so the coating crisps and colours. Fat that genuinely bubbles and smokes is fat that is breaking down.
- Which fish, and how big"Small fish" here means whole flatfish, cooked on the bone; the recipe gives no weight or trim. The staged timing adds up to seven minutes, which suits a whole fish rather than a thin fillet.
- Scoring the backShallow cuts through the skin on the dark side, as the recipe directs. This lets heat into the thickest part along the spine so the fish cooks more evenly.
- The two coatingsMilk and flour gives a thin, lacy crust; egg and breadcrumbs gives a heavier one. The recipe offers them as alternatives and says nothing about how long to leave the fish coated before frying.
- "Prepare as for boiling"A shorthand for the ordinary cleaning a fish gets before cooking: trimming, gutting and wiping dry. Dry is the operative word; a wet fish will not hold flour.
- Fried parsleyWhole sprigs of curly parsley, thoroughly dried, dropped into the hot fat for about ten seconds until the fizzing stops and they turn dark and brittle. Wet parsley spits violently, so shake it out well and stand back.
- Depth of fatThe recipe calls for a frying pan of hot fat, not a deep fryer, so this is a shallow fry; it gives no depth and no turning instruction. Crowding the pan will drop the temperature and steam the fish rather than crisp it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; it is written to scale with the number of fish, one small whole fish being a portion. Serve as soon as it is drained.
The instructions for fried flounder are compressed to the point of terseness. Flounder, dab and fluke were abundant and cheap in New York markets around 1900, and serving such fish whole is a presentation that has largely disappeared from American restaurants in favour of filleting. The garnish of lemon halves and fried parsley is the standard nineteenth-century dressing for fried fish in both English and French practice, and the little heaps of dark green parsley turn up beside everything from whitebait to sole in cookbooks of the period. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, compiled his 1896 volume from the hotel's working kitchen, and this entry reads exactly like what it is: a note to remind a professional, not to teach a beginner.