No. 1160

Frostfish or Whiting, Fried

Tacaud ou Merlan Frit

Make a slight incision on each side of the fish; season with salt and roll them briskly in flour; plunge them in small quantities into hot frying fat and let acquire a color while cooking. The smaller the fish, the hotter the fat must be. When fried, salt and dress them at once. All fried articles should be served very hot, and garnished with fried parsley or simply sliced lemon. The smaller fish such as gudgeons, etc., are dipped in milk and flour, then fried on a hot fire; dress them in pyramid form on a napkin with fried parsley on top and quartered lemon around.

← No. 1159 Frostfish or Whiting, Cherbourg Style Cod, Haddock & Halibut No. 1161 Frost Fish or Whiting Baked →

For the Modern Kitchen

Charles Ranhofer's method for small whole fish is nothing but flour, salt and correctly hot fat — which means the fat temperature is the whole recipe.

Fat temperature"The smaller the fish, the hotter the fat" gives no figures; in modern terms that is roughly 375F for small fish and nearer 350F for anything approaching a pound, so the interior cooks before the crust darkens. Fry in small batches as instructed; crowding drops the oil temperature and the flour coating turns pasty rather than crisp.
What the fish areMerlan is European whiting; the American "frostfish" of this book is the Atlantic tomcod, a small winter-run relative of the cod. Tacaud is the bib or pouting. Any small lean white fish of 6–12 oz works — whole silver hake, small haddock fillets, sand whiting, or porgies.
The incisionThe recipe calls only for a slight cut on each side. Scoring of this kind keeps the skin from bursting and helps heat reach the thickest part; it is not decorative.
Flour, not batterSalt first, then roll in flour "briskly" and fry immediately — flour left to sit on wet fish goes gummy. The milk dip given for gudgeons is simply a way to make flour adhere to very small fish; whole milk or buttermilk both work.
Salting twiceRanhofer salts before flouring and again the moment the fish leave the fat. The second salting is the one you taste, and it only adheres while the surface is still oily and hot.
Fried parsleyFlat-leaf parsley must be bone dry before it goes into the fat, and it needs only 10–15 seconds at frying heat. Wet parsley spatters violently in 375F oil; pat it thoroughly and lower it in with a spider or basket.
Frying fat"Frying fat" in an 1890s professional kitchen would usually have been clarified beef fat or lard, held deep in a heavy pot. Peanut, rice bran or refined sunflower oil gives the same result; you want at least 2 inches of depth so the temperature holds.
ServingThe napkin-lined platter absorbs drips and was standard service; a rack over a warm plate does the job now. Figure one whole fish of 8–10 oz per person as a course, two if the fish are tomcod-sized, and serve within a few minutes of frying.

A Little History

This is No. 1160 from The Epicurean (1894), Charles Ranhofer's encyclopedic record of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the double heading — Tacaud ou Merlan Frit over "Frostfish or Whiting" — shows exactly what the book was doing: mapping the French repertoire onto the fish that actually came off American docks. New York's winter markets were full of frostfish, the Atlantic tomcod, which runs inshore in cold weather; Ranhofer treated it as the local stand-in for the small gadoids a Paris kitchen would fry. The gudgeon he mentions is a tiny European freshwater fish traditionally served in a heap as friture, and the pyramid on a folded napkin with fried parsley and quartered lemon is the classic presentation for any small fried fish of the period. That such minor fish earned three consecutive numbered entries — Cherbourg style, fried, baked — says a good deal about how much more varied the nineteenth-century fish counter was than ours.