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Fried Porgies
Scale, clean, trim and wipe dry six small, fresh porgies. Heat three tablespoons melted lard in a frying pan, add the fish. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper and fry for five minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish. Remove all the fat from the pan, place on a brisk fire with half ounce butter, toss the butter in the pan until a light brown; squeeze in the juice of half a sound lemon, adding one teaspoon chopped parsley; lightly toss, pour over the fish and serve.
A plain pan-fry finished with browned butter and lemon — the technique is sound, but the fish and a few of the measures need translating.
- The hinge is the butterThe finishing butter must go brown but not black. Half an ounce (1 tablespoon) in a hot, wiped-out pan reaches the nutty stage in under a minute; pull it off the heat before you add the lemon juice, which will spit.
- What a porgy isIn American fish markets this is scup or one of its relatives in the Sparidae family, sold whole at roughly 1/2 to 3/4 lb. If you cannot get them, small sea bream, snapper or any firm-fleshed panfish of similar size behaves the same way.
- Frying timeFive minutes a side suits fish of 3/4 lb or more. Truly small porgies are done in 3 to 4 minutes a side — the flesh should just release from the backbone at the thickest part.
- Lard and heatThree tablespoons of lard is right for the job; a neutral oil with a high smoke point works as well. "A brisk fire" for the butter means medium-high, not the highest setting.
- No flour is specifiedThe recipe fries the fish bare, which gives a softer skin than a floured fry would. A light dusting of flour on the dried fish is a period-appropriate option and will crisp the skin without changing the dish.
- "A sound lemon"Simply an unbruised, unblemished one — the phrase is a market instruction, not a variety. Half a lemon yields about a tablespoon of juice.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of white pepper is distributed across six fish, inside and out; it reads high in one line but is about right per portion.
- YieldSix small fish serve three as a main course, or six as a first course. Serve at once — browned butter dulls quickly and the skin softens on standing.
Porgies were among the cheapest and most abundant fish on the Atlantic seaboard when this book was compiled, hauled up by the barrel off Long Island and New England and sold for pennies to city households; bony and small, they were fried whole rather than filleted. The finish here is straight classical French practice ŏ— beurre noisette with lemon and parsley, close to what is often called meunière, though that term properly denotes the whole preparation, including a flour dredge this recipe omits — applied to a humble local fish, which is exactly the sort of graft that gives a book called The International Cook Book its reason for existing. Hotel and restaurant cooking in the period ran on French method, and the American market supplied whatever swam nearest.