Home › The World's Kitchen › White Perch, Tartare
White Perch, Tartare
Scale and wipe six very fresh white perch, season with teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, lightly baste them with a little cold milk, roll them in flour, dip in beaten egg, and then roll in bread crumbs. Arrange in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for ten minutes, lift up, drain, sprinkle a little salt over them, dress on a dish, decorate with six quarters of lemon and parsley greens, then serve with tartare sauce separately.
A plain deep-fried fish with a standard three-stage breading. Two things need attention: the fat temperature, which the original leaves entirely to judgment, and the frying time, which is long for a small panfish.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is roughly 3/4 teaspoon of pepper. That is a firm seasoning for six small fish; scale back if your pepper is freshly ground and coarse.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil, but the phrase was standard shorthand for fat hot enough to bubble vigorously the instant food touches it: 360-375F. Below 350F the crumb coat absorbs grease; above 385F it colors before the fish is done.
- Ten minutes is too longTen minutes is longer than a small panfish is likely to need. White perch are small -- often half a pound or so -- and a whole one will frequently be cooked through before ten minutes at frying heat. Check early, and fry only until the coating is deep gold and the flesh at the backbone flakes.
- The milk bastingWiping the fish with cold milk before flouring is not a marinade; it gives the flour something to cling to on a fish that has been wiped dry. Without it the flour coats less evenly.
- Frying basketBreaded items can stick to a wire basket and tear when lifted. If that is a worry, lower the fish into the fat with a spider or slotted spatula and retrieve them the same way, or put them in the basket only once the fat is fully up to heat.
- Whole fish, bones inThe fish are cooked whole; the recipe specifies only scaling and wiping, so gutting and any trimming of head or fins go unmentioned. Fillets work but need only a few minutes, and the breading should be pressed on firmly.
- Tartare sauceThe period version is a mayonnaise built on hard-boiled or raw yolk with chopped capers, gherkins, shallot and parsley, thinner and sharper than the bottled kind. Here it is served cold and separately, as the recipe directs, rather than spooned over the fish.
- YieldSix fish serves six as a course or three to four as a main. Fry in two batches so the fat temperature does not crash.
White perch (Morone americana) is not a true perch but a small relative of the striped bass, abundant in the brackish tidal rivers and estuaries of the American Atlantic coast, and in the late nineteenth century it was a cheap and constant presence in New York and Baltimore markets. Alessandro Filippini, long of Delmonico's, filled his books with exactly this sort of thing: a common local fish given the full French service treatment, crumbed, deep-fried, ringed with lemon quarters and parsley, and sent out with a sauce in a boat alongside. Sauce tartare itself is generally traced to the French kitchen of the mid-1800s, where the name was attached to a cold mayonnaise sharpened with capers and pickles; by Filippini's day the pairing with fried fish was so fixed that a recipe could name it and assume the cook knew the rest. The dish is a good marker of how the grand-restaurant style filtered into home cookbooks, bringing its vocabulary of dressing, decorating and serving separately with it.