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Fried Frost Fish
Clean and neatly trim three medium, fresh frost fish. Have two tablespoons cold milk on a plate with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; mix well, then roll the fish in the seasoning and then in flour. Heat in a frying pan two tablespoons olive oil, place in the fish and fry on a brisk fire for seven minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, decorate with parsley greens and six sections of lemon and serve.
A plain pan-fried whole fish that needs two adjustments: the fish itself, which no fishmonger sells under this name, and the cooking time, which is roughly double what a small fish wants.
- What a frost fish isOn the American East Coast the name usually means tomcod (Microgadus tomcod), a small inshore relative of the cod netted in cold weather, though it was also applied to silver hake or whiting washed ashore after the first frosts. Substitute whole whiting, small hake, sand whiting or another lean white fish of 8-10 oz, cleaned with head on or off as you prefer.
- Cut the timeSeven minutes a side over high heat will dry out a fish this size and darken the flour past pleasant. Three to four minutes a side is enough for a whole fish of about 8 oz; it is done when the flesh at the thickest point behind the head lifts cleanly from the backbone.
- "A brisk fire"Medium-high on a modern burner — hot enough that the fish sizzles the moment it lands, not so hot that the oil smokes before the fish goes in.
- The milk-and-seasoning plateThis is a wet dip rather than a full milk bath: two tablespoons of milk mixed with the salt and pepper, then the fish rolled through it and into flour. Two tablespoons will barely wet three fish, so expect to spread it with your fingers, or use a shallow saucer of milk and season the flour instead.
- Salt levelA full teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of white pepper for three small fish is aggressive by current taste, and much of it will stay on the plate rather than the fish. Half those amounts season three fish adequately.
- Oil quantityTwo tablespoons of olive oil is a thin film and will be absorbed almost at once by flour-coated fish. Use three to four tablespoons in a wide pan, and fry in two batches rather than crowding — crowded fish steam and the coating slides.
- YieldThree fish of this size serve two, or three as a light course. The lemon sections and parsley are the whole of the sauce, so cut the lemon generously.
"Frost fish" is a seasonal name rather than a species name, and it belongs to a time when fish were sold by what showed up in the nets that week. Tomcod run into the estuaries and tidal rivers of the Northeast in late autumn and winter, spawning under ice, and were caught in quantity through holes cut in the surface — cheap, abundant, and largely gone from most fish counters now, though what fishery there was appears to have been a small local and recreational one. The name was also used for silver hake, which were said to strand themselves on the sand on frosty nights, a story repeated in nineteenth-century fish books. That this appears in a book called The International Cook Book says something about how such collections worked: a local market fish, floured and fried in olive oil with lemon, presented as a technique any cook could apply to whatever small whole fish the season delivered.