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Fried Butterfish
Neatly wipe six very fresh, medium-sized butterfish; place them on a dish, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, then baste with a gill cold milk and briskly roll in flour. Heat three tablespoons melted lard in a frying pan, place them in the pan, one beside another, and fry for five minutes on each side. Lift up with a skimmer, dress on a hot dish, decorate with thin slices of lemon and parsley greens and serve.
A plain shallow-fry that depends almost entirely on getting the fish and the timing right. The milk-and-flour dredge is the whole technique, so the fish must go into hot fat the moment it is floured.
- A gill of milkA gill is half a cup. It is used only to wet the fish so flour adheres; there is no egg and no batter, and the fish should be floured and fried immediately or the coating turns to paste.
- ButterfishAtlantic butterfish (Peprilus triacanthus), also sold as dollarfish, and in some markets confused with the closely related harvestfish — a small, deep-bodied, oily panfish, similar in shape to a small pompano, usually cooked whole. If your fishmonger has none, small porgy, sand dab or small whole pompano behave the same way in the pan.
- Buy them cleaned"Neatly wipe" assumes the fish arrived gutted and scaled from the market. Ask for that, then dry the fish thoroughly — wet skin will not take flour and will spit in the fat.
- Five minutes a side is too longA medium butterfish is thin and cooks through in roughly three minutes per side; ten minutes total will dry the flesh and darken the crust past pleasant. Fry until the coating is deep gold and the flesh at the backbone flakes cleanly, about 145F.
- The fatThree tablespoons of lard in a wide frying pan is a genuinely shallow fry. Lard suits the flavor of the dish, but any neutral oil works; heat it until a pinch of flour sizzles at once.
- One beside anotherThe instruction to lay them side by side matters — crowding drops the pan temperature and the fish steam rather than crisp. Six fish need a wide pan or two batches.
- SkimmerA flat perforated lifter. A slotted fish spatula does the job; a slender turner is essential, as butterfish break easily once cooked.
- YieldSix fish serve three as a main course or six as a first course. Serve the moment they leave the pan, with the lemon and parsley as written.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when American cookery writing was shaped by hotel and restaurant kitchens, and its short, brisk method notes read like instructions passed down a line rather than to a home cook. Butterfish earned its place in books like this because it was cheap and enormously abundant along the Atlantic coast, netted in quantity through the summer; too small to fillet and too oily to keep long, it was a fish you bought fresh and fried whole the same day. The name is generally traced to the rich, soft, fatty flesh, and the fish carried a string of regional alternatives, dollarfish and harvestfish among them. The milk-and-flour dredge here is a simple treatment, lighter than the egg-and-crumb coating used for larger cuts.