Pan-Fish
Place in pan with heads together, and fill spaces with smaller fish; when ready to turn, put a plate over, drain off fat, invert pan, and the fish will be left unbroken on the plate. Put the lard back in the pan, and when hot, slip back the fish, and when the other side is brown, drain, turn on plate as before, and slide them on the platter to go to the table. This improves the appearance, if not the flavor. The heads should be left on, and the shape preserved as fully as possible.
This is a method rather than a full recipe: the book assumes you already know to clean, salt and dredge your fish, and tells you only how to fry a panful without breaking them. The whole point is the plate trick, so read that first.
- What a pan-fish isAny small whole fish that fits a skillet without cutting — bream, perch, crappie, small catfish, trout, smelt. Figure 2 to 3 fish per person if they run 6 to 8 inches.
- The hinge: the plate flipSmall fried fish break when lifted individually because the skin sticks and the flesh is barely set. Covering the pan with a plate, pouring off the fat, then inverting the whole pan turns the packed layer of fish over in one piece. The pan must be swirled so nothing is welded to the bottom before you invert.
- Draining the fat first is not optionalInverting a pan holding hot lard over a plate will send it down your arm. Pour it into a heatproof bowl, invert, then return it to the pan and bring it back to temperature before sliding the fish in.
- The missing coatingNineteenth-century Southern practice was to salt the cleaned fish, then roll it in cornmeal (or half cornmeal, half flour) just before frying; this entry says nothing about a coating. A dredged fish is less likely to stick, which matters if the layer is to come out of the pan in one piece.
- Lard and heatLard is called for and works well; a neutral oil can be substituted. The book gives no depth or temperature; on a modern stove about a quarter inch of fat at roughly 350-365F is hot enough that the meal sets on contact without colouring before the fish is cooked.
- TimingThree to four minutes a side for a 6-inch fish. Done when the flesh at the thickest point behind the head is opaque and parts from the backbone; the eyes turning white is the traditional cue.
- Heads onLeaving the heads on is partly for looks, as the text says, but it also holds the body together and keeps the flesh moister. Modern cooks who object can behead the fish, but the packing arrangement — heads together, small fish filling the gaps — is what makes the layer solid enough to invert.
- Pan choiceCast iron, and no larger than you can lift with one hand plus a plate on top. A wide skillet full of fish and fat is heavier and more awkward than it sounds.
Pan-fish is a category, not a species: freshwater fish too small to fillet and just right for a skillet, the sort caught by a child with a cane pole on a summer afternoon rather than bought at market. The Dixie Cook Book, like its Northern parent volumes in the same publishing family, treats them as an everyday resource rather than a delicacy, which is why the entry bothers with presentation rather than seasoning — the reader is assumed to know how to fry a fish and to need help only in getting a dozen of them to the table looking whole. The cornmeal dredge that goes unmentioned here is the standing Southern default, and the frank admission that the plate trick "improves the appearance, if not the flavor" is characteristic of the book's tone: practical advice about how food should look when it is set down in front of company.