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Whitefish, Saute
Pare off the fins and cut off the head of a very fresh whitefish of three pounds. Split in two through the back, remove the spine bone, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Baste all around with two tablespoons cold milk and lightly roll in flour. Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in a frying pan, lay the fish in it and fry for six minutes on each side. Dress on a dish, squeeze the juice of half a sound lemon over, sprinkle a teaspoon chopped parsley on top, pour the butter from the pan over the fish and serve with a little parsley greens.
A plain butter sauté that lives or dies on the coating: milk then flour, nothing more, so the crust is thin and the butter browns rather than steams. A few of the original's proportions are lean by current practice.
- The fishWhitefish here means Great Lakes lake whitefish, a sweet, soft-fleshed freshwater fish sold whole and dressed. Lake trout, walleye, arctic char or a farmed rainbow trout of similar size behave the same way in the pan.
- Butterflying"Split in two through the back" most likely means cutting down either side of the backbone from the top and opening the fish flat, spine removed, the two sides probably still joined by the skin; the recipe treats it thereafter as one piece. Ask the fishmonger to do it; a 3 lb fish opened this way is wide, and it is the reason a large pan matters.
- Pan sizeA butterflied 3 lb whitefish will not fit an ordinary 10-inch skillet. Use a 14-inch pan or an oval fish pan, or cut the fish into two fillets and cook them in batches.
- ButterA tablespoon and a half will not carry a fish this size and will burn before the second side is done. Use 3-4 tablespoons, or half butter and half neutral oil so the milk solids do not blacken during the twelve minutes of cooking.
- Milk and flourThe cold milk is a binder, not a batter. Brush it on, dredge lightly, shake off the surplus, and get the fish into the pan straight away; if the flour sits it turns pasty and slides off in the butter.
- TimingSix minutes a side suits a thick butterflied fish over moderate heat. Thinner fillets need three to four minutes on the flesh side and a minute or two on the skin. Cook to 145F at the thickest point, or until the flesh parts cleanly along the flakes.
- "Dress on a dish" and "a sound lemon"Dressing means arranging the cooked fish on a warmed serving platter, not adding a sauce. A sound lemon is simply an unblemished, firm one.
- FinishingPour the pan butter over after the lemon, not before, which is the order the recipe itself gives. Add the parsley last so it stays green.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish serves three, generously two. Boiled or steamed potatoes would be an unremarkable accompaniment, though the recipe names none.
Lake whitefish was one of the great commercial catches of the Great Lakes through the nineteenth century, shipped on ice to Chicago, Buffalo and New York in enormous quantities, and it turns up constantly in American cookbooks of the period as the default freshwater fish for frying and baking. The treatment here is French rather than American: sauté meunière in all but name, the miller's-wife method of a light flour dusting, butter, lemon and parsley, which was the standard restaurant handling of any fine-fleshed fish. Milk stands in for egg as the binder, giving a coating thin enough that the fish still tastes of itself. The recipe is set down with exact weights, exact timings and no explanation offered.