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Flounder Saute, Meuniere
Make a light incision around the head of a fresh three-pound flounder and with a towel pull off skin on both sides. Season all around with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, lightly wet all over with a little cold milk and lightly roll in flour. Thoroughly heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a large frying pan, add fish, fry for five minutes on each side, set in oven for fifteen minutes, remove and dress on a hot dish, spread over a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and squeeze over the juice of half a sound lemon. Remove all fat from pan, add half an ounce butter, shuffle pan on fire until butter attains a nice brown colour, then pour over fish and serve.
A whole flounder cooked on the bone, floured and pan-fried, then finished with browned butter. The recipe is sound; what it leaves out is the oven temperature and how little butter it really asks for.
- The hinge: the finishing butterThe meuniere butter is browned, not burnt. Half an ounce (1 tablespoon) in a hot, wiped-out pan goes from foaming to hazelnut-brown in under a minute, and from brown to black almost as fast. Pull it off the heat the moment it smells nutty and pour it straight over the fish.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. The fish is already coloured on the outside, so the oven is only finishing the interior; a moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F, is a reasonable guess at what was meant. A 3 lb whole flounder may well be done before fifteen minutes are up: check at eight to ten, and look for flesh that lifts cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point.
- Use an ovenproof panThe recipe assumes you move the fish from frying pan to oven and back. Cast iron or a heavy steel skillet handles both; the fat is then poured off before the butter stage, which is why the pan must be clean and dry for browning.
- Pan sizeA three-pound flounder is a wide fish and a long one. It needs a very large frying pan, or a roasting tin set over two burners. If it will not lie flat, ask for fillets and cut the frying time to two or three minutes a side, skipping the oven entirely.
- SkinningPulling the skin off with a towel works on flounder and sole, where the dark skin lifts in one piece from a nick at the tail or head. A fishmonger will do it in seconds. The recipe asks for both sides skinned; leaving the white underside skin on helps hold the fish together in the pan.
- Butter for fryingOne and a half tablespoons is thin for a pan that size, and plain butter at frying heat will brown before the fish does. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, gives the same flavour without scorching the milk solids.
- YieldA three-pound whole flounder serves three, generously two. Serve it directly from the hot dish so the browned butter and lemon stay together rather than separating on the plate.
A la meuniere means "in the manner of the miller's wife" -- the reference is to the flour dredge, and the preparation is a fixed one: flour, butter, lemon, parsley. The choice of flounder over the classical Dover sole may say something about the book's audience: sole in early twentieth-century America generally meant imported fish at imported prices, while flounder came off the Atlantic coast cheaply and behaved much the same way in the pan. The milk wash before flouring -- rather than egg or plain water -- is the sort of practical adjustment that helps a flour coat stay on a fish that has just been skinned.