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Panfish, Meuniere
Neatly wipe six medium, even-sized, fresh panfish. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly baste them with milk, then gently roll in flour. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan. Arrange fish in the pan, one beside another, and nicely fry them five minutes on each side. Lift them with a skimmer, dress on a hot dish, sprinkle half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over and also the juice of half a sound lemon. Add half ounce butter to the pan, shuffle the pan on the fire until the butter has attained a nice brown, pour it over the fish and serve.
A straightforward meunière, but written for small whole freshwater fish and for a coal range where the pan sat over uneven heat. Two things need adjusting: the timing and the butter.
- What panfish meansNot a species but a category: small freshwater fish that fit whole in a skillet perse - perch, bluegill, sunfish, crappie, small trout. Buy them scaled, gutted, heads on or off as you like. The recipe gives no weight or yield; six small fish will serve two or three depending on their size.
- Cut the cooking timeFive minutes a side will dry out a fish an inch thick at the shoulder. Give small panfish 2–3 minutes a side over medium-high heat, until the flour crust is deep gold and the flesh at the backbone is opaque.
- "Baste with milk"This means dip or brush, not soak. The milk is only there to make the flour stick; shake off the excess flour or it will burn in the pan before the fish cooks.
- Butter alone will scorchTwo tablespoons of butter in a modern thin-bottomed pan will brown past the point of pleasure before the fish is done. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half neutral oil, and keep the fresh butter for the finishing sauce.
- Half ounce butterOne tablespoon. Add it to the emptied pan off direct heat for a moment, then swirl — "shuffle the pan" — over medium heat until it smells of hazelnuts and turns light brown. Past that it goes bitter in seconds, so pour it over the fish the instant it colours.
- SkimmerA flat perforated lifter. A fish spatula does the job; slide it under the whole fish in one motion, since flour-crusted panfish break apart if turned twice.
- Order of operationsParsley and lemon juice go on before the brown butter, as written. The hot butter hitting the lemon is the point of the dish; do not premix them.
- A sound lemonSimply an unblemished one. Half a lemon for six fish is modest — taste and add more.
Meunière means "miller's wife," the standard French shorthand for anything dredged in flour before frying, and the treatment — flour, butter, lemon, parsley, then a second spoonful of butter browned in the empty pan — was long established in professional French practice. What is American here is the fish. "Panfish" is a term from lake and river fishing rather than the market: any small species too modest to fillet and just the right size to lay whole in a skillet, several to a pan. Putting them under a French sauce name is exactly the move this sort of hotel cookbook was built on, translating whatever the local waters gave up into the vocabulary of the formal dining room.