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Yellow Perch, Saute
Scale, trim and wipe six small, very fresh yellow perch. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, lightly wet with milk, then roll in flour. Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in frying pan, add the perch, one beside another, and fry for six minutes on each side or till a nice golden colour. Remove, dress on a hot dish, squeeze over the juice of half a sound lemon and pour the butter from the pan over the fish and serve.
A plain pan-fried fish with almost nothing to it, which means the details of heat and coating are what decide whether it works.
- ServesSix small perch feeds two to three people as a main course. Yellow perch are small fish — a pan-sized one runs 6 to 9 inches and yields two modest fillets.
- Whole fish, not filletsThe recipe assumes the fish are scaled, gutted, head on or off as you like, and cooked bone-in. If you use fillets instead, cut the time to about two minutes a side; six minutes will dry them out.
- Six minutes a sideSuits a whole fish an inch or so thick over moderate heat, not high, and is likely more than small perch need. If the butter is smoking the flour will blacken before the fish is done. The flesh should come away from the backbone cleanly and read 145F at the thickest point.
- Butter alone will burnA tablespoon and a half of butter for six fish is very little fat and it will brown past the point of pleasantness. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, gives you the same flavour with more room before it burns.
- The milk and flourWetting with milk rather than egg gives a thin, lacy crust rather than a batter. Flour the fish immediately before they go in the pan — dredge early and the coating turns to paste.
- Don't crowd the pan"One beside another" is the instruction that matters. Six perch in one pan will steam rather than fry unless the pan is wide; use two pans or work in batches and hold the first lot in a 200F oven.
- White pepperThe usual choice in classic cookery for pale dishes, conventionally to keep black flecks off the fish. Black pepper tastes the same here if you don't mind the look.
- "A sound lemon"Simply an unblemished one, not shrivelled or mouldy.
Yellow perch (Perca flavescens) was one of the great everyday food fishes of the Great Lakes and the northern rivers, sold cheap and cooked simply, and its sweet firm flesh still anchors the Friday fish fry across the upper Midwest. Filippini's book treats it in the French manner — à la meunière in all but name, which is to say floured, fried in butter, finished with lemon and the pan butter poured back over. That formula was the standard restaurant treatment for any small delicate fish, and its appearance here reflects how thoroughly French professional technique had been absorbed into American hotel and household cooking. Commercial perch stocks in the lakes have fluctuated sharply since, and much of what is sold now comes from carefully managed fisheries.