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White Perch Sautes
Scale, trim and wipe six small, white perch. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper; roll in flour. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add the fish, one beside another, and fry for six minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, decorate with six pieces lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
A plain pan-fry that assumes you know how to clean a fish and that you are working over a coal range. Two things need adjusting: the fat and the time.
- Six minutes a side is too longSmall perch fillets or whole pan-sized fish cook through in about 3 to 4 minutes per side over medium-high heat. Whole fish of 8 to 10 oz might take 5. Go by the flesh at the backbone turning opaque, not by the clock.
- One tablespoon of butter will not do itFor six fish in a single layer you want a large skillet and about 3 tablespoons of fat. Butter alone browns and burns at frying heat; use half butter, half neutral oil, or clarified butter, and add a knob of fresh butter at the end for flavour.
- "Trim" means gut and gillThe original takes it for granted. Scale from tail to head, slit the belly, remove the viscera and gills, cut off the fins, and wipe dry rather than rinse. A wet fish will steam and the flour coating will slide off.
- White perchIn American usage this is Morone americana, a temperate bass of the Atlantic coast and Chesapeake, not the yellow perch of inland lakes. Yellow perch, sea bass, bream, small snapper or crappie all behave the same in the pan.
- Season the flour, not the fishA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper mixed into the dredging flour distributes far more evenly than salting six fish by hand, and the excess falls away in the shaking.
- Do not crowd, and do not move them"One beside another" is the instruction that matters. Fish laid touching drops the pan temperature and steams; left undisturbed until a crust forms, it releases cleanly. Fry in two batches if the pan is small.
- Dressing on a hot dishWarm the serving platter in a low oven. Fried fish on a cold plate goes flabby within a minute.
- YieldSix small whole fish may serve three as a main course, or six as a first course, though the six pieces of lemon suggest the original assumed one fish each.
Sauté here means what it says: cooked quickly in a small quantity of fat in an open pan, as against frit, deep-fried in a bath. Filippini and his contemporaries used the French vocabulary freely in American cookbooks, and many of the fish entries in books of this period are variations on the same three lines: dredge, fry, lemon and parsley. White perch was a common market fish in the Northeast and around the Chesapeake in the early twentieth century, sold cheap and small, and it appears in household books alongside butterfish and smelts as an everyday supper rather than a set piece. Lemon and parsley were the conventional finish for fried fish of the period; parsley was sometimes fried as well, though this recipe leaves it green.