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Trout, Meuniere
Draw from the base of the head (gills) three medium, very fresh brook trout. Wipe neatly, make three small incisions on each side of the trout, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, lightly wet with milk and roll them in flour. Heat two tablespoons butter in a frying pan, place the fish one beside another in the pan, and briskly fry them for five minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, squeeze the juice of half a lemon and sprinkle half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over them; add a tablespoon butter to the pan, toss it on the range until brown, pour it over the trout and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry that lives or dies on the temperature of the butter. Three points of technique in the original are worth spelling out.
- "Draw from the base of the head"This means gutting the trout by pulling the viscera out through the gill opening rather than slitting the belly, so the fish holds its shape in the pan. A fishmonger may do it on request; a belly-slit fish works fine but is more likely to gape.
- The incisionsThree shallow slashes per side, as the original directs, let heat reach the thickest part and stop the skin from contracting and curling. The original calls them small; do not cut deep enough to loosen the fillet.
- Milk then flourThe milk is there only to give the flour something to cling to. Flour immediately before the fish goes in the pan — a coating left to sit turns pasty.
- Two tablespoons of butter is not enoughFor three trout in one pan, use four to six tablespoons, or butter cut with a spoonful of neutral oil. Butter alone at frying heat will brown fast, and the milk solids in it scorch before the fish is done.
- TimingFive minutes a side suits a 10–12 oz brook trout. Smaller fish of 6–8 oz need three to four minutes a side. The fish is done when the flesh at the backbone has just turned opaque; carryover heat on the hot platter finishes it.
- The beurre noisetteThe final tablespoon of butter tossed "until brown" should reach a hazelnut colour and smell nutty, which takes under a minute in a pan already hot from frying. Take it off the heat while it is lighter than you want and pour at once — it darkens in the pan.
- Order of operationsLemon and parsley go on the fish first, browned butter over the top, as the original directs.
- YieldThree trout, three servings. Fry in two batches rather than crowding one pan; steamed fish will not brown.
Meunière is conventionally explained as French for "miller's wife," the name usually taken to point at the flour dredge that defines the method — a light coating, butter, lemon, parsley, and nothing else. It is one of the plainest treatments in the French repertoire for freshwater fish, and sole and trout meunière were staples of American hotel and restaurant kitchens of the early twentieth century that cooked in the French manner. Brook trout, specified here rather than any trout, were a prized wild catch in the northeastern United States at the time; the insistence on "very fresh" is not decoration but a working assumption. The same technique carried to New Orleans, where trout meunière — made with local sea trout and often a darker, more heavily reduced butter — became a restaurant fixture in its own right.